Chapter 5
H e herded Beth through the exit and toward an SUV she recognized from the beer joint’s parking lot. It was parked at the curb, an airport police officer guarding it.
Bowie opened the passenger door and practically heaved her inside. He shut the door, shook hands with the guard, and thanked him. In back, he opened the hatch and put her roll-aboard inside, then came around and climbed in.
As he started the car, she launched. “You had better have a damn good reason—”
He interrupted. “There was a blood moon the night Crissy Mellin disappeared.”
The sudden statement took her aback, but after a few seconds she bobbed her chin.
“And you think that’s significant?”
Again she gave a curt nod.
He didn’t immediately look away from her. She held his gaze. Then, after a quick glance over his left shoulder, he gave the steering wheel a sharp turn, entering the stream of traffic to the chorus of a dozen protesting horns. “Buckle your seat belt,” he said, and wrestled with his until it clicked.
Nothing more was said until he turned into the drive-through lane of a fast food chain no more than a mile from the airport. “I’m starving. You want something?”
He pulled up to the backlit, multicolored menu and lowered his window. Her head was still spinning over the rapid series of events. All the brightly colored pictures of high-calorie meals blurred. She couldn’t isolate a single item. “Diet Coke.”
“That’s it?”
“Yes, thanks.”
By the time they reached the pickup window, the order was ready. He set the sack in his lap, their drinks in the cup holders, then steered into a parking spot in front of the building. It faced the runway across the boulevard where a jet was landing.
He switched off the car engine, dug into the sack, and took out a cardboard tray piled with French fries and breaded chicken tenders. He extended it toward her.
“No thank you.”
“You sure?”
“Yes. What happened to you?”
“What do you mean? Oh, this?” He looked in the rearview mirror and gingerly touched the bruise on his cheekbone beneath a vivid black eye. “After you drove off, I went back into the bar and got into a scuffle with those rednecks.” He picked up a piece of chicken and took a bite.
“More than a scuffle, I think. What provoked it?”
“You.”
“Me?”
He picked up a couple of fries and, as he bit into them, looked over at her. “You left without me. That brought my manhood into question. I took exception to their observations about it.”
She didn’t believe him, but she wasn’t about to challenge his truthfulness. Not on that subject. “Why did you pull that stunt at the airport?”
“To stop you from leaving before I could ask you some questions.”
“How did you know I was leaving?”
“I called the car rental company and asked for your contact info.”
“And they gave it to you?”
“I identified myself, told them you were a material witness who’d skipped out on the prosecutor, and the trial starts tomorrow. Words to that effect. They’d recently rented you a car, and the contract was bound to have your contact info on it. At least a cell phone number. The agent was still reluctant. The manager was sent for.”
He scarfed the rest of the tender before continuing. “I told him, look, I could get a court order, but the judge is already pissed off because we lost track of our witness, and I’d hate to rile him further. Eventually, though, he’d grant me the order because he wants the trial to proceed as scheduled. In the long run, I would get the info from you anyway. So why not save us both the hassle?”
He raised his shoulder. “He gave me your number. He also volunteered that you’d already turned the car in.” He stopped eating and gave her a baleful look. “You were clearing out awfully quick, weren’t you?”
When she didn’t offer an explanation, he continued. “Anyway, I thanked him, checked the flight schedule, and had to beat it up here to catch you before you got on that four o’clock.”
“If you had my phone number, why did you create that mortifying scene? Why accost me at all? Why didn’t you simply call me?”
“Because you might have simply hung up on me.” He continued to eat, took another drink, all the while watching her. “Did you call for me at the station this morning?”
“Twice.”
“Why?”
“I thought I’d try again.”
“To get me to talk about the Mellin case?”
“To get you to be civil.”
He grinned. “Try me. Being civil shouldn’t be too hard.”
“Apparently it is, Mr. Bowie. You just made a public spectacle of me.”
“Wait. You’re angry? What right have you got to be mad?” He dropped the fries he’d been about to eat back into the container. “Remember, you lured me into that meeting in the bar.”
“Which you adjourned.”
“Because I wanted no part of your agenda. But you baited me, and I was left believing that you would welcome reopening the discussion. Guess I read you wrong. You were winging it. That speaks volumes.”
“I tried to reach you.”
“It’s just as well you didn’t.”
He checked his wristwatch. “With luck you can still make the flight. Want me to take you back to the airport? Believe me, I’d love nothing better than to wave you off. Because, see? I don’t want to get caught up in another shitstorm, and that’s what you represent to me.”
“This isn’t all about you,” she exclaimed. “My purpose in coming down here wasn’t to disrupt your life, Mr. Bowie.”
“Oh, for pity’s sake, I’m John, okay. Okay? ”
After their raised voices, the abrupt silence was even more noticeable. They exchanged hostile looks; then he did some swearing under his breath as he turned his head away from her and stared out the windshield. He remained in that pensive pose for what seemed to her a long time. Instinct cautioned her not to intrude on it.
Then, speaking softly as though talking to himself, he said, “Maybe my life needed disrupting.” He turned back to her and held out the half-empty tray of food. “Last chance.”
“I’m good.”
He dumped everything into the sack and got out of the car to carry it to a nearby trash can, giving her an opportunity to look at him without his knowing. He was broad-shouldered, tall, lean, almost lanky. But she’d felt his forearm yesterday when she’d detained him at the table in the bar. There was no doubt of its strength.
Wind sweeping across the road from the runway lifted his hair, which was dark blond with an occasional gray strand threaded in. She’d noticed a dusting of gray in his scruff and eyebrows, too.
Had the premature gray been genetically programmed? She didn’t think so. The lines at the corners of his eyes and that dent that frequently appeared between his eyebrows indicated that it had been earned.
Today he was wearing trousers, an ironed shirt, sport jacket, and necktie, although it had been loosened. However, the dressier clothing didn’t alter his blue-jeans saunter. Innate confidence was in every step.
But another quality also characterized that stride. Disregard? Indifference? She had described him to Max as being “unmoved.” This man would be moved by little, she thought now. He was audacious and seemed beyond embarrassment, like he didn’t give a damn about opinions of him or consequences of his actions.
That was it. She’d hit the nail on the head. John Bowie didn’t give a damn.
He took off his jacket and tossed it into the back seat as he slid behind the steering wheel. He made himself comfortable in the seat and said, “About the moon.”
“Are we officially reopening the discussion?”
“Not officially. No promises. Off the record. Understood?”
“Understood.”
“Okay. Why do you think the moon that night was significant?”
“Did no one ever consider that it might be?”
He gave her a grim smile. “No. Including me. But I researched it last night. The last blood moon straddled the night of November seventh and eighth of 2022. Here in southern North America, Central time zone, the eclipse occurred during the wee hours of the morning of the eighth. Are we in sync on those points?”
“Yes,” Beth replied. “Please continue.”
“Before going to bed that night, Crissy’s mother, Carla, noticed they were out of milk, low on bread. Crissy offered to go to the nearest convenience store. It’s just outside the mobile home park where they lived, a five-minute walk at most.”
Beth didn’t interrupt to tell him that she’d made note of the store today when she was there.
“Carla gave Crissy a twenty-dollar bill, which she clearly remembered her slipping into the pocket of her hoodie. The hood was up. It wasn’t raining hard, but it was drizzling. Crissy left. Carla went to bed. She didn’t know that was the last time she would see her daughter.
“Because of an office staff meeting, Carla left for work early the next morning, assuming that Crissy was safely asleep in her room. Crissy was usually home from school by the time Carla came in from work. She wasn’t there. Carla called Crissy’s cell to see what was up. She heard the phone ringing inside the house and located it in Crissy’s bedroom.
“Apparently, the night before, Crissy had left her phone behind. But why hadn’t she taken it to school with her that morning? Feeling some alarm, Carla checked the kitchen. No new loaf of bread in the bread box, no carton of milk in the fridge.
“She called the boy next door, Billy Oliver. Crissy was eighteen and would have graduated high school the following May. He was two years younger and didn’t go to public school, but they were friends. He told Carla he’d seen Crissy leaving their house on foot and had gone outside to ask where she was off to. She told him she was running a quick errand and invited him along. Because of the weather, he declined and went back indoors. That was the last he’d seen or heard from her. She hadn’t been at school that day. That’s when Carla called the police.”
“And was given the run-around,” Beth said. “That’s a quote from her Crisis Point interview.”
He nodded somberly. “She was put through the normal drill. Had the two of them had a fight? Had she left the house angry, threatened to run away? Could she be with a boyfriend, or on a jaunt with girlfriends?
“Carla was adamant that an unexplained vanishing act would be out of character for her daughter. She was convincing. And as of then, it was the evening of the eighth. My partner and I were assigned to begin investigating it as a missing person’s case. We usually wait twenty-four hours before making it official, but Crissy had already been missing for almost that long.”
She noticed that his forehead furrowed, creating that dent between his eyebrows, as though it pained him to think about that even now.
“We were the first to question Billy Oliver. Then Tom Barker turned him over to another detective. He was questioned relentlessly and two days later was taken into custody.”
He said nothing more for a time, then turned to her. “When I began thinking about all this last night, I couldn’t remember what kind of weather we’d had the night of November seventh and into the wee hours of the eighth, so I looked it up. It was lousy. Overcast, foggy, heavy rain off and on. Typical coastal Louisiana weather.
“You asked why I didn’t consider the moon as being significant. Why anybody didn’t. According to what I read last night, the eclipse here began at two A.M. and lasted until six-thirty. Because of the cloud cover, nobody would have seen it, even if they were awake at that time.
“We’d had heavy rains that entire week, causing local flooding and necessitating evacuations. Two people down in Chauvin drowned when their car was swept away. Every law officer and first responder in the southern half of the state was stretched thin. In the midst of all that, Crissy went missing. No one was paying attention to a moon we hadn’t seen for a week and couldn’t see that night, either.”
He repositioned himself in his seat, stretching his legs out beneath the dashboard as far as they would go. “I didn’t even know for sure what a blood moon was. I’d heard the term, but I was thinking voodoo, end of the world predictions, folklore legends and rituals, werewolves. But it’s a real thing, right? An astronomical phenomenon?”
“Yes. Some lunar eclipses are referred to as blood moons when they’re actually not.”
“I got sleepy before I learned what defines one.”
“It’s a total lunar eclipse, not partial. Earth gets between the sun and a full moon. That’s the distinction. It’s a specific alignment. Earth is perfectly positioned to cast an encompassing shadow onto a full moon.
“With Earth in the way, so to speak, sunlight isn’t projecting directly onto the moon. It’s being filtered through Earth’s atmosphere. That filtration is what causes the moon to appear orange or reddish in color. Thus the name.”
He took it all in, then said, “Son of a gun. Who knew?”
She smiled. “Well, ancient civilizations knew. They may not have known what caused the phenomenon, but they attached spiritual or supernatural significance to a red moon. They were recorded and anticipated. They figured out that they occur every three and a half years and that there are two blood moons during the years they occur.”
“Interesting. The one in November of 2022 when Crissy disappeared was the second that year.”
“Right. The first was the night of May fifteenth–sixteenth, depending where on the globe you were.”
He nodded absently, thought on it a little longer, then said, “Okay, I now have a basic understanding of the astronomical properties. What I don’t get is how all that intersects with Crissy’s disappearance. Let’s recap. You don’t think Billy Oliver was the guilty party.”
“Do you?”
The question seemed to upset him. In any case, he didn’t answer. “Still recapping. You believe the actual perp is out there and will strike again during the next blood moon.”
“I have reason to believe that it’s a possibility.”
“How good a reason?”
“Good enough that you shouldn’t rule it out.”
“I’m not ruling it out.”
“Not yet,” she said, “but skepticism is written all over your face.”
“Look, this is all new to me, and, fair to say, it’s a little off the wall. Give me a minute here, all right?”
“We don’t have a minute.”
“Yeah, last night I caught the tail end of the weatherman talking about a blood moon. He said we’ll have two sometime this year.”
“Not ‘sometime,’ John. The first one will occur on the night of March thirteenth–fourteenth.”
“The thirteenth and…” She saw when realization struck him. He ran his hand over his mouth “Holy shit.”
“That’s right. Four days from now.”