"In the meantime, the three of us need to talk."

Amelia said, "Then I'd better figure out something to entertain the boys."

Everything that she'd packed into her car the day before had been unpacked and put back in its proper place. While she was settling the boys down with a DVD on the TV in the living area, Dawson joined Headly at the table and assessed the doughnut inventory. "Any with Bavarian-cream filling?"

"Sorry, no."

"Then this will have to do." He selected a plain glazed.

"How'd it go last night?"

The question immediately put Dawson on the defensive. "How'd what go?"

"Did you get the shakes?"

"I told you. I'm not a damn addict."

"Any nightmares?"

He rolled his shoulders in a gesture that could have meant anything or nothing.

"Only because you didn't sleep at all."

Dawson silently endured Headly's appraisal of his haggard face and the dark circles under his eyes.

"If she ever sees you looking normal, she might not be attracted. It may be the zombie effect she finds appealing."

Dawson finished the rest of the doughnut, asking around the last bite, "Haven't you got more important things to do than to try and piss me off?"

"What's giving you nightmares?"

"I don't recall telling you I had nightmares."

"You didn't deny it, either."

Dawson folded his arms over his chest, letting his body language speak for itself.

But Headly wasn't through with him. "When are you going to tell me what happened to you over there? Why are you afraid to fall asleep?"

Dawson mentally counted to ten, then repositioned himself in his chair to signal a change in topic. "Have you talked to Eva?"

"This morning."

"How is she?"

"Worried."

"She knows you don't eat right when she's not around."

"Not about me, about you."

"Then she's worrying for nothing. How many times do I have to tell the two of you that I'm all right?"

Headly took a deep breath, blew it out. "I shouldn't have sent you down here."

Dawson snorted a laugh. "Too effing late."

"I know." Headly looked at him meaningfully, then glanced over his shoulder toward the living room where the boys could be heard arguing over which movie they would watch. "How is she?"

"She slept alone, if that's what you're asking."

"It isn't."

Dawson knew the more defensive he was, the more Headly would browbeat him, so he addressed his question about Amelia without reading a subtext into it. "She's brave. Tougher at the core, I think, than she appears on the surface. Steelier."

"I'm afraid that before this is over, she'll need to be."

Before Dawson could ask what that remark portended, Amelia rejoined them, expelling a breath as she sat down. "Be concise, Mr. Headly. Buzz Lightyear will pacify them for only so long. I promised them playtime after the movie."

"Can't blame them for wanting to play outside."

"They want to play with Dawson."

Headly turned and looked at him expectantly, obviously waiting for a comment. All he said was, "You'd better get started. You're wasting valuable time."

Headly snuffled as though to say that Dawson was dodging an issue, but that for the moment it had to wait. "Okay, here's where we are. Bernie was conveyed to the mainland on the ferry late yesterday evening."

"He said he was driving to Charleston."

"Well, he didn't. Not in that car, anyway. They found it parked in a public lot just a few blocks from the ferry pier. No sign of him. We'll keep an eye on the car, but my guess is that he abandoned it."

"Why do you think that?" Amelia asked. "He doesn't know his true identity has been discovered."

"The car's license plate was bogus. It's been a few years since Michigan used that design, but few people down here would notice. Carl did such a good job of altering the year of expiration that it was undetectable from a distance. Plus, the VIN number has been scratched out so that it's unreadable. No prints inside the car. None on the door handles. He wiped it clean."

"Is the parking lot attended?" Dawson asked.

"No. Only monitored by meter maids. You park, feed bills into a metal box or use a credit card. The box spits out a receipt you leave on the inside of your windshield. His was good for twenty-four hours, and, from the time stamp, we know he was back on the mainland for forty-seven minutes before our band of brothers launched our raid on this house last night. He got a good head start."

"Security cameras?"

"Several on the pier. We have him driving off the ferry. That's it. The bags and boxes you saw him loading into the trunk?" he said to Amelia. "All empty. They were for show."

"The bad hips, too, in all likelihood," Dawson remarked sourly. "Nice touch, though." He hitched his chin in the direction of the house Bernie had occupied. "What about that?"

"Techies are still gathering evidence, but so far it hasn't yielded anything substantive. Full of fingerprints, of course, but I doubt any of them will be Carl's."

"He didn't walk around wearing rubber gloves."

"I'd bet my left nut-excuse me, Amelia-that we don't find a print that matches. Don't forget, all we have is a print for the middle finger, left hand."

"Hair in the shower drain?"

"Gathered. Skin cells off the linens. But we don't have Carl's DNA. Believe me, if he was easy to catch, I'd have caught him."

"What about his house in Michigan?" Amelia asked.

"No such house number or street."

She was amazed. "But I sent Christmas cards. They never came back."

Headly raised a shoulder. "All I know is, the house address doesn't exist and neither does the e-mail address he left with Miss DeMarco to give to you."

Dawson said, "There must be a record of his leases for the house next door."

"One would think. We got the manager of the rental office out of bed late last night to serve the search warrant. He was obstinate at first, didn't want to divulge personal information on a repeat client. But after some arm twisting to the tune of 'obstruction of justice,' he told us that Bernie Clarkson always paid him with a money order."

"Like you buy at Seven-Eleven?"

"Exactly like that. I asked the guy if that hadn't seemed odd to him. His answer, 'He was from Michigan.' As if that explained why he didn't pay with a credit card or check. Anyhow, the little old man from the Upper Peninsula didn't leave a paper trail."

He focused on Amelia. "Did he always come alone?"

"Yes. The first summer he spent here-"

"2009."

"That's right. Jeremy was overseas. Grant was just a baby. I stayed the whole summer out here. Dad came off and on, but I spent a lot of time with Bernie because we were both lonely. He was grieving the recent death of his wife."

"That's what he told you. Doesn't mean that Flora's dead. Did he ever show you a photograph of her?"

"No. Which, now that I think about it, was odd. He talked about her with affection."

"Did Jeremy ever meet so-called Bernie?"

"No. Even after he mustered out, he rarely came here. He couldn't take time away from work. On one rare occasion when he did spend a few days, I invited Bernie to join us for dinner, but he excused himself, saying he didn't want to intrude on our family time."

"He declined because they were afraid you'd notice a resemblance."

"I doubt I would have," she said. "I see nothing of Jeremy in the Wanted-poster photograph of Carl."

"I wasn't struck by a similarity, either," Dawson said. "I was totally taken in by Bernie."

"Don't beat yourself up," Headly said. "That's a lousy picture on the Wanted poster and it's over forty years old. Carl was just launching his criminal career then. He must look a lot different now."

"Like a septuagenarian," Dawson said. "Wrinkled, age spots. His hair has thinned considerably and it's completely white. The limp could be faked. But maybe not." He thought of something else. "The night of the storm, when he answered my knock, his eyes were red and he was rubbing them. I thought I'd woken him up. Now I think he must wear contacts to change his eye color. I'd caught him without them."

Addressing Amelia, Headly said, "Bernie and Jeremy never let you see them side by side because you might've detected something. If not alike in looks, in mannerisms."

"You're still of the opinion that Jeremy knew who his father was, and that they were-"

"In cahoots? Absolutely. Bernie entered your life around the time your marriage started deteriorating. That wasn't coincidental. He came here to keep an eye on you while Jeremy was in Afghanistan."

"I was alone year-round. Bernie lived next door only during the summer months."

"But when you're in Savannah, your schedule is more structured," Dawson said, picking up on Headly's thread. "You stick to a routine built around your work, the boys' schooling. You see the same people, go to the same places, do the same things. Basically, your life is under constant scrutiny."

"That's right," Headly said. "You aren't as free in town as you are at the beach."

"Free?" She asked with a light laugh. "To do what?"

"To spend the night in another man's house."

Headly's words fell like bricks. Amelia lowered her gaze to the tabletop. Dawson sat there seething for a moment, then said, "Tucker must've gotten a real kick out of telling you."

"I'm surprised you didn't."

"Nothing to tell. Amelia stayed that night only because of the power outage."

"Yeah, Tucker said you hammered that home. About two dozen times." He divided a look between them. "Look, you're grown-ups. I don't care. I'm only saying what it looked like to-"

"That asshole Tucker."

"No, to Jeremy and Carl. But let's leave that for a moment. We'll come back to it."

While Headly paused to take several sips of coffee, Dawson looked over at Amelia with apology. For all their protests to the contrary, they hadn't fooled anybody into believing that their night together had been entirely chaste.

Headly resumed. "They found the CandyCane tied up at a public, out-of-the-way dock on a channel on Tybee Island. I haven't been there, but I hear it's perfect for Jeremy's purposes. Boaters come and go. Nobody pays much attention. Easy for him to get over here to spy on Amelia or watch his kids play on the beach. Last time somebody noticed the boat being there was early Monday."

"He may not have been the man on that boat," Amelia said.

"Knutz has a couple of people working it. Here's a giveaway. The craft has been scrubbed down with bleach inside and out. So either it was piloted by a stocky, bearded, law-abiding germophobe who's made himself scarce, or Jeremy made certain that if the authorities somehow linked the boat to the murder on Saint Nelda's, it couldn't be linked to him."

"It wasn't that hard to find," Dawson said. "Which tells me that he didn't see much risk of it being connected to the crime."

"Or maybe," Headly said, "he knows he won't need it anymore and abandoned it like Carl did his car."

"Either way, Jeremy doesn't realize that he's been had."

"For the time being," Headly said. "And that's good. The longer we can keep him and Carl in the dark, the better."

Dawson didn't like the way Headly was eyeing him as he tacked on that last part. "What?"

"It would be nice if we had a decoy. Somebody to feed to the media sharks like chum. A pseudosuspect to throw Carl and Jeremy off."

Dawson pointed to his own chest. "Me? I?"

"I'm just saying."