Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

the trough that signaled another wave curling toward him.
    Nguyen’s death proved to be painful and protracted. Providence tends to repay people in the coin they hand to others.

    “Here we are,” Joe shouted above the wind. He cut the engine and let the boat drift into a shallow inlet.
    Douglass saw that Faye’s island was large enough to be heavily treed. It wasn’t so very far from land, but the nearest shore was a long stretch of uninhabitable swamp. Besides, the true descriptor of an island’s remoteness was the distance its residents had to travel to swap water transportation for ground travel. An island dweller didn’t measure distance to land. No wonder Wally’s Marina played such a central role in Faye’s life.
    Still, no matter how remote, this island was surely well-known to fishers and boaters plying these waters. That would explain the “No Trespassing” signs that decorated half the trees along the shoreline. At this moment, though, the thing that Douglass appreciated most about Faye’s island was its solidity. He figured he could have withstood the bucking and swaying of about seven more waves, then he would have been forced to vomit.
    “Do you think we’d be safer sleeping out here, rather than fighting this weather all the way back to shore?” he asked, thinking of his rebellious stomach.
    He assumed he was wrong, because Joe’s glare said he thought Douglass was a fool who didn’t understand English.

Chapter 25
    The necklace broke, as Faye had hoped it would.
    She suspected the Senator had known it would, because he said, “I never looked forward to killing anybody before.”
    Faye tried to stop her head from lolling as she gasped for the breath he’d choked out of her. She refused to die until she understood. Why her? Why Krista and Sam? Why anybody?
    “Never looked forward…” she wheezed. “You’ve killed six—” She let a long whistling breath interrupt her. “Maybe more. Should be enjoying yourself by now.”
    “No.” He spoke quickly and precisely. “Only four.”
    “Only four?” Now Faye could breathe. She could almost think. “Does that mean the devil will assign you a cooler spot in hell? Are you trying to tell me you didn’t kill Krista and Sam?”
    “No, I did that. I had to do that. I couldn’t let them—”
    He hadn’t let go of her neck and his face was a centimeter away from hers. She needed, really needed, for him to get out of her face, so she intentionally sprayed saliva as she hissed, “You couldn’t let us dig up your family? Well, we already did that. Yesterday.”
    “No one will ever figure out who they are. My parents disappeared within two months of each other and the sheriff and his Deputy Mike McKenzie never doubted my story. They just figured that two no-account rednecks had shucked their responsibilities and run off to fornicate and birth another crop of mental defectives like themselves.”
    The anger boiled out of him and he shook her until the breath rattled in her throat again. Submission seemed appropriate, so she said, “You’re right. Somebody should’ve looked for your missing parents. Nothing but prejudice prevented it.”
    “Of course, it was prejudice. I counted on it to cover up the killings, and I knew what I was doing. And I’m still safe. Nobody’s going to suspect that those bones on Seagreen Island belong to my family. My parents were buried with a ten-year-old and, by golly, here I am. Cyril Kirby is all grown up. There is no missing ten-year-old. I’m not worried.”
    “You were worried enough to shoot two kids.”
    The Senator did not respond.
    “You say you’ve killed four people. I know of six bodies. Why don’t we take an inventory?”
    Her challenge, to provide an accurate accounting of what he’d done, seemed to clear his mind.
    “Abby was an accident,” he said in a rational tone. “I’d just gotten paid for my first month on the oil rig, and I’d never had cash, folding money, to spend in my life. I wanted to spend it on Abby, because she was pretty and—all through high school—none of the boys had managed to get her attention.”
    The Senator’s grip tightened on her arm when she taunted him with, “So your idea of getting her attention was to beat her to death?”
    “No. No. I knew she was living alone for the summer at her daddy’s beach house. When I knocked on her door, she didn’t answer, so I walked around back to the patio and there she was at the wet bar, fixing herself