“So, he is hiding something.”

She nodded. “I believe he is. You know the stats on who discovers the body, right?”

“You mean, the person to discover the body is usually the killer-those stats?”

“Right. The same stats would apply to someone who ID’s a body.”

“Like what Jimmy did.”

“Exactly like what he did. It could be a coincidence that he saw Addie’s face on the news and that he was the first one to call in, but the stats say it probably isn’t.”

“He was never involved with her, and he hadn’t seen her in over twenty years, so why was he so interested in identifying her?” I mused out loud.

“He had a potential motive, and he’s been seen recently with someone else who had a similar motive.”

“Lori Webster.”

“Lori Webster,” she affirmed. “Think about it, Toni, either one of them could have done this alone, or they could have done it together. Why would these two people-one who moved away to Austin almost thirty years ago, and one who moved to Georgetown sixteen years ago-why would these two people still have anything to do with each other? They have one thing in common as far as I can see.”

“He loved Addie, and she loved Doug.”

“Bingo.”

“Jimmy had been left behind years ago, but gave up when Addie married Dody, then he finds out his brother is having a thing with Addie-and at the same time Lori is getting dumped off by Doug.”

“It’ll be interesting to talk to Dody in person-to get his take on all this. Jimmy says his brother wasn’t involved with Addie. I wonder what Dody says.”

“Apparently he’s not saying much of anything to the boys.”

I pulled off the main road and drove up the gravel driveway to the front of Dody’s ramshackle little house. It looked virtually abandoned. There was an old, beat-up, partially rusted-out pickup truck parked to the left side of the house. In the front yard, a chicken wandered by, and out in the grass amongst the cedar trees two goats grazed.

“Lovely,” Leo remarked.

“What did you expect for a guy who’s drunk ninety percent of the time? He hasn’t held a job for more than six months in the last fourteen years.”

“Great.”

We walked up onto the rickety wooden porch and I knocked on the door. Dody answered. He was wearing worn and dirty jeans and a filthy white T-shirt that had a hole in the left sleeve and one in the bottom near the hem. He reeked of everything foul.

He cleared his throat. “I ain’t buyin’ nothin’ today, ladies,” and he started to close the door.

“I’m not selling anything, Mr. Waldrep. I’m the forensic sculptor who reconstructed the face of your wife. This other lady is an associate of mine.”

He stopped his closure of the door and squinted at both of us. “What do you want with me? I already talked to them cops. I don’t know nothin’ about what happened to my wife. I don’t have nothin’ else to say about it.”

“Please, Mr. Waldrep. We just have a couple of questions and then we’ll go.”

He continued squinting at Leo and me, and then opened the door. “Come on in then, but don’t tarry too long. I got things to do.”

I doubted that seriously. The only thing I imagined that Dody Waldrep had to do was to drink more than he already had. He was slurring his words, and as we watched him walk through the room back to his chair, we exchanged glances that told me Leo had also noticed the wobble in his step.

He practically fell into the chair, and then motioned for Leo and me to sit on the sofa. It was a horrible excuse for furniture and I imagined that it was probably a breeding ground for all manner of mites and who knew what else, but I sat anyway.

“So, what is it you need to know that I ain’t already been asked?”

“First of all, Mr. Waldrep, are you aware that more bones were found near the river yesterday?”

“Heard sumpthin’ about it on the news. Didn’t pay much attention.”

“You didn’t think that it sounded familiar to the way in which your wife’s bones were found?”

“Didn’t think about it. She’s been found, we buried her, end of story.”

“It didn’t occur to you that these might be the bones of Doug Hughes?”

“Huh,” he grunted. “Who in blazes cares?”

“Mr. Waldrep, don’t you wonder what happened to them after they left Viola.”

“I don’t have no reason to wonder. I know what they done, and I don’t care what kind of trouble they run into. Whatever it was, it’d serve ’ em right I say.”

“Then you do believe that Addie and Doug were having an affair?”

“I don’t believe it-I know it.”

“How do you know, Mr. Waldrep?”

“I know, that’s all. I was her husband, you know. You people are incredible. You think I lived with her and I don’t know,” he snorted, and then wiped his nose on his sleeve.

“Do you have any idea who might have wanted to kill Addie and Doug?”

“Well, it wasn’t me, that’s all I say. They run off before I had any kind of opportunity for that, and I was too busy trying to make ends meet and all after they left.”

“So, then, you don’t have any idea who it could have been?”

“What did I just say, lady? Isn’t that what I just said?”

“Well, I guess I just thought you might want some of these questions answered yourself.”

“I don’t have no questions, lady. My wife run off with him, she’s dead now and buried. There ain’t no more questions as far as I’m concerned. Got it?”

Leo looked at me and nodded. We had indeed “gotten it” and we said our goodbyes to Dody and left.

Once we were safely back in my car, we talked about our brief encounter with Dody.

“Tommy won’t be happy with me, since I learned nothing new from either Jimmy or Dody,” I said.

“We did learn something new, though.”

“What?”

“We learned that Jimmy is definitely hiding something, and we learned that Addie’s husband believed that she was having an affair with Doug. So, one of them is right and the other is wrong, but they’ve both given us some interesting things to think about.”

“You think he could have killed them?”

“Dody?”

I nodded.

“He could have. He’s pretty disorganized, though. I don’t see him planning everything the way it would have been planned originally. He’s the right personality for the dumping of these bodies, though.”

“What if he wasn’t this messed up back then?” I asked.

“Didn’t that lady at the diner say he always had problems?”

“She said he was cantankerous,” I said, “but she didn’t say when specifically he began having a drinking problem. His daughters didn’t go live with their grandmother until two years after their mother disappeared.”

“Well, I suppose if he were less impaired by the alcohol sixteen years ago, he might have been capable of the crime, but it’s really impossible now to know.”

“Let’s pay a visit to Lori Webster,” I suggested, “and see what we can find there.”

“Okay. I’m game if you are.”

We sped up the highway to Georgetown and I wheeled the car into the town square, scoping for a spot in front of the store where she worked. We found a space just around the corner, and I parked the car.

Once inside the store, we asked for Lori and we were directed up to the office. There we introduced ourselves to her, and she led us into a small room off the main office. The room contained a copier, a fax machine and several file cabinets. Lori wore a dark green skirt and white blouse with a beige cardigan over it. She was a frail-looking woman, with stringy shoulder-length brown hair. I think her eyes were gray, but from the moment we met her, she never looked us in the eye. It was just as Mike and Tommy had said.

“You said you’re the artist who reconstructed Addie’s face?”

She fidgeted with her hands, fluttering her eyelids when she spoke and punctuating her phrases with frustrated sighs.

“Yes, that’s right.”

“So, what can I do for you?”

“Well, we found similar remains in another location in Austin the other day, and it’s been determined that they are the remains of a man.”