His eyebrows ticked up. “You don’t waste time.”
He was observant.
“I’m not here to gossip,” I said, lifting the iced coffee to my lips. “We want the cold-hard facts and so do our listeners.”
He scratched his cheek and settled into his seat as he considered us. “We did not do a full segment after the autopsy results.”
“Why not?”
Mason shrugged. “You’re in the business. You know how it is. A few weeks after William died a bigger sensation happened. A former stripper hired a hitman to kill her millionaire husband. It had everyone wrapped up. They’re going to trial soon.”
“Really?” I made myself a note to look into that for a future segment. We could cover the trial.
“Plus,” he continued, “regular viewers don’t want the nitty-gritty of a death, and how do you explain William’s? The official cause from the coroner was suicide. By drowning.”
I lifted my head from my notebook. “But there was no water in his lungs.”
“Exactly,” he said and paused while I sipped my coffee. “No one wants the heat of exposing corruption in the local government.”
Was he admitting? Local corruption? I made another note.
“Did you read the full report?” he asked.
I pulled it up on my phone. “Yeah.”
“They found dexamethasone in his bloodstream. High levels.”
“Yeah.” I remembered reading that. I’d looked it up because I wasn’t sure what it was. “It’s just an antihistamine.” William died in April, at the height of allergy season.
He grunted. “Google the side effects.”
The police didn’t find it suspicious. But they also didn’t question the oddness that he had no water in his lungs but died by drowning.
“Did the police have any suspects, or did they always consider it suicide?”
Mason took a sip of his water before answering. “They treated it like a suicide from the beginning of the investigation. Hell, I can’t guarantee they even did a formal investigation.”
“Why not?” Small-town police stations had a history of messing up murder investigations. Charleston wasn’t small. But while bigger cities had more resources, they also had more cases.
“His friends said he’d been acting strangely for weeks. He’d been keeping secrets, and he even missed a few shifts at the tour company. There’s a video of him on the ship that night. Strange shit,” he said and leaned toward the table. “He was talking to ghosts.”
“Yeah, we saw it.” So far, Mason hadn’t given me anything new. It was frustrating. “You didn’t update the case when the video came out?”
I’d researched this case for a week before coming to Savannah. If that had made it online, I’d have seen it before this morning.
Mason shook his head. “Didn’t want to make the dead look bad. The case was closed, and we’d moved on to the rich and famous.”
“It’s tragic,” Dane said. He’d been listening intently as we talked.
Tragic, but more common than most people wanted to admit.
“Have there been many other drug deaths in the city this year?” I asked. My iced coffee was almost gone along with my questions.
Mason gave us another grunt. “Yeah, but who doesn’t have their drug deaths? We don’t even report on most of them. Makes people too depressed.”
How much did the general population not realize about what happened in their towns?
I hesitated as the two men seemed to size each other up in the moment of silence and then asked the question I really wanted answered. “Do you believe it was suicide? And if not, how did William die?”
