“Home?” he said now.
“Here,” Creedmore said.
“Let me get this straight. You left your son, passed out in the dock house, and Lanier Ragan’s body in the boat shed?”
“I covered it with a tarp,” Creedmore said.
“And then you just … went home, and acted like nothing had happened?”
“It wasn’t our fault,” Dorcas said, her voice pleading, whining really. “We didn’t kill her. And we knew Little Holl wouldn’t have done it. But we had to save our son.”
Makarowicz crossed and uncrossed his legs, struggling to maintain his composure.
“Okay,” he said. “Tell me how Lanier Ragan’s body ended up in that septic tank.”
50
Nobody Knows Nothing
“We don’t know,” Dorcas Creedmore said. She turned to her husband. “Tell him, Holl.”
“As God is my witness, I don’t know how that body ended up there,” Creedmore said.
“You don’t expect me to believe that, do you?”
Creedmore started pacing around the room. “I went back out to the beach house the next morning, around eight. I wouldn’t let Dorcas go with me. She was too upset.”
Makarowicz was fascinated by the dynamic of this incredibly dysfunctional couple. The wife was skilled at passive-aggressive behavior, the husband was a controlling jerk. No wonder they’d managed to raise such a fucked-up, entitled son.
“What did you plan to do with Lanier Ragan’s body?”
Creedmore’s face took on a pained expression. “I didn’t have a plan. I thought about putting her body in our boat, dumping her in the marsh. Doesn’t matter now because when I got to the boat shed, she was gone.”
“Gone, how?”
“She wasn’t there, man. I swear, she was gone. I thought I’d have a heart attack when I opened the shed door and there was no blue tarp and no body.”
“And where was your son while all this was happening?”
“Holl forgot to tell you that part. He’d sobered up, sometime in the middle of the night, and drove home,” Dorcas volunteered. “I kept him home from school that day, obviously.”
“Obviously, he was probably upset, having killed his pregnant girlfriend the night before,” Makarowicz said, his voice dripping sarcasm. “Did you take his binky away and put him in time-out?”
“Don’t you talk to my wife that way,” Creedmore said, his fists balled up.
“Fine,” Makarowicz said. “Tell me what you said to Junior when you saw him the next morning.”
Dorcas looked at her husband, again, for guidance. “I didn’t really say anything. Just gave him some aspirin and told him to take a hot shower.”
“What did you do with the clothes your son was wearing?” Makarowicz asked.
“What’s that got to do with anything?” Creedmore interrupted.
“Mrs. Creedmore?”
Dorcas looked down at her empty glass. “I think I threw them away.”
“You think?”
She looked up. “Holl said I should get rid of them. I took them out to our backyard fireplace and I burned them.”
“As one does when one wants to get rid of incriminating evidence,” Mak said.
“I was trying to protect my son,” Creedmore said belligerently. “You’d do the same thing if you were in my place.”
“Wrong,” Makarowicz said, pointing a finger at the older man. “If I thought my son might be falsely accused of a crime, I wouldn’t destroy evidence that might prove otherwise. And if I thought he’d killed someone, I’d hand him over to the police myself.”
“We weren’t cops,” Dorcas protested. “We were scared.”
“Did you ask your son, point-blank, if he killed Lanier Ragan?”
Dorcas stood up, grasping her empty glass. She swayed slightly as she walked back toward the kitchen.
Watching her, Creedmore let out a long, martyred sigh. “Christ. Drunk and it’s not even noon yet.”
“Mr. Creedmore, did you or your wife discuss what had happened to Lanier Ragan with your son? Did you tell him you’d discovered her body the night before? And that you’d moved it?”
“No.”
“So you actually have no idea whether or not he had anything to do with her murder.”
“We know he couldn’t have done it. He was never violent. Never been in any real trouble.”
“That you know of,” Makarowicz said. “The fact is, I’ve spoken to a woman whom he sexually assaulted, when she was fifteen and he was nineteen.”