Back Dead and Gone
Chapters (21)
  1. Title Page
  2. Copyright Page
  3. Acknowledgements
  4. Chapter 1
  5. Chapter 2
  6. Chapter 3
  7. Chapter 4
  8. Chapter 5
  9. Chapter 6
  10. Chapter 7
  11. Chapter 8
  12. Chapter 9
  13. Chapter 10
  14. Chapter 11
  15. Chapter 12
  16. Chapter 13
  17. Chapter 14
  18. Chapter 15
  19. Chapter 16
  20. Chapter 17
  21. Chapter 18

Andy faced me again after he’d stuffed his handkerchief in his pocket. I looked at his weary, broad face. I knew he’d do his best to find out who’d done this. I trusted Andy. Square-built Andy, some years my senior, had never been a smiley kind of guy. He was serious and suspicious. I didn’t know if he’d chosen his occupation because it suited him, or if his character had altered in response to his occupation.

“I hear she and Jason had split,” he said.

“Yes. She cheated on him.” This was common knowledge. I wasn’t going to pretend otherwise.

“Pregnant and all, like she was?” Andy shook his head.

“Yeah.” I spread my hands. That was the way she was.

“That’s sick,” Andy said.

“Yeah, it is. Cheating with your husband’s baby in your stomach between you . . . that’s just specially icky.” It was a thought I’d had but never voiced.

“So, who was the other man?” Andy asked casually. “Or men?”

“You’re the only guy in Bon Temps who doesn’t know she was screwing Dove Beck,” I said.

This time it registered. Andy glanced over at Alcee Beck and back to me. “I know now,” he said. “Who hated her that much, Sookie?”

“If you’re thinking Jason, you can just think again. He would never do that to his baby.”

“If she was so free with herself, maybe it wasn’t his baby,” Andy said. “Maybe he found that out.”

“It was his,” I said with a firmness I wasn’t sure I felt. “But even if it wasn’t, if some blood test says it wasn’t, he wouldn’t kill anybody’s baby. Anyway, they weren’t living together. She’d moved back in with her sister. Why would he even go to the trouble?”

“Why were the FBI at your house?”

Okay, so this questioning thing was going to go one way. “Some questions about the explosion in Rhodes,” I said. “I found out about Crystal while they were there. They came along out of professional curiosity, I guess. Lattesta, the guy, thinks this might be a hate crime.”

“That’s an interesting idea,” he said. “This is undoubtedly a hate crime, but whether or not it’s the kind of thing they should investigate, I don’t know yet.” He strode off to talk to Weiss. Lattesta was looking up at the body, shaking his head, as if he was noting a level of awfulness he’d thought couldn’t be reached.

I didn’t know what to do with myself. I was in charge of the bar, and the crime scene was on bar property, so I was determined to stay.