Sookie 09 Dead and Gone by Charlaine Harris Page B

Lattesta said mildly.
    Antoine said, “Just by sight. She come in the bar some.”
    D’Eriq nodded.
    “Crystal Norris Stackhouse,” I said. “She’s my sister-in-law. The sheriff’s called my brother. But you need to call her uncle, Calvin Norris. He works at Norcross.”
    “He her nearest living relative? Besides the husband?”
    “She’s got a sister. But Calvin’s the leader of—” I stopped, not sure if Calvin had endorsed the Great Reveal. “He raised her,” I said. Close enough.
    Lattesta and Weiss huddled with Bud Dearborn. They were deep in conversation, probably about Calvin and the tiny community out at the bleak crossroads. Hotshot was a group of small houses containing lots of secrets. Crystal had wanted to escape from Hotshot, but she also felt most secure there.
    My eyes returned to the tortured figure on the cross. Crystal was dressed, but her clothes had ripped when her arms and legs had changed to panther limbs, and there was blood everywhere. Her hands and feet, impaled with nails, were crusted with it. Ropes did the work of holding her to the crossbar, kept the flesh from ripping free of the nails.
    I’d seen a lot of awful things, but this was maybe the most pathetic. “Poor Crystal,” I said, and found tears were rolling down my cheeks.
    “You didn’t like her,” Andy Bellefleur said. I wondered how long he’d been out here, looking at the ruin of what had once been a living, breathing, healthy woman. Andy’s cheeks were patched with stubble, and his nose was red. Andy had a cold. He sneezed and excused himself to use a handkerchief.
    D’Eriq and Antoine were talking to Alcee Beck. Alcee was the other Bon Temps police detective, and that didn’t make the investigation look too promising. He wouldn’t be too regretful about Crystal’s death.
    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