Death's Half Acre dk-14 Page 11

  “No, it was Christmas. She was real big on giving herself presents. New Toyota for her birthday last spring, this house for Christmas. First new house she’d ever lived in. You’d’ve thought it was Buckingham Palace,” she said with all the scorn of someone born to the privilege and status her father’s family had possessed.

  “Our old house had been in the Bradshaw family for a hundred years,” Dee said, “and she just walked away from everything there. Sold it all or sent it to the landfill. Even my stuff. The only thing she kept was her dollhouse and her clothes.”

  “Her dollhouse?”

  “You don’t think she ever let me play with it, do you? Mom didn’t like to share. When she was little, I guess her people didn’t have much. She used to talk about the dollhouse she’d seen in a shop window and how she used to wish on the new moon for one, so Dad gave it to her for their tenth wedding anniversary. She was always fiddling with it and buying new stuff for it.”

  There was a sudden catch in her voice and Richards realized she was not quite as indifferent to her mother’s death as she would have everyone believe.

  “So when did you see her last?” Richards asked gently.

  “I don’t know. Tuesday? Around two, maybe? We fought. She said I could go back to school or I could go live with Dad. She made me give her my key as I was leaving, but she was already starting to cool off.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah, she was eating a late lunch and watching a history program at the kitchen counter—some guy jumped out of an airplane twenty-five years ago with a bag of diamonds or something.”

  “Eating what?” Richards asked.

  “One of those grocery deli salads.”

  “What kind?”

  “Spinach.”

  “With hard-boiled eggs?”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “Depending on how far along digestion was, it helps us establish a time of death.”

  “Oh gross!” the girl said, making a face.

  “And you’re sure that program was on?”

  “Yeah, they were showing pictures of the jewelry and Mom was like drooling over the diamond necklaces.”

  After Dee Bradshaw had departed with extra makeup and clean clothes, leaving her dirty ones still piled in a heap on her bed, Richards called to Ginsburg, “You hear that?”

  “Already on it,” the SBI agent said, busily searching the Internet. “Here we go. Unsolved Mysteries: The Nicholas Radzinsky Case. You remember him?”

  “Sorry, I was too young, but I read the article in the N&O a couple of weeks back about it. Guy stole his employer’s plane one night, along with a gym bag full of jewelry worth millions, put the plane on automatic, and parachuted out somewhere between Washington and the Great Smokies, right?”

  “Yeah. I was eleven at the time. My friends and I figured he must have flown right over us up there in Lynchburg. We spent that whole damn spring hiking the woods, absolutely convinced he must have dropped the bag and we were going to find it and get that big reward. All we got were chiggers and poison oak.”

  Richards laughed. “So what time did the program air in this area?”

  Sabrina Ginsburg ran a beautifully manicured, pink-tipped finger down the screen. “According to this, it was a half-hour segment that ran from one-thirty to two.”

  “So if she finished eating by two, that would put our TOD somewhere around four-thirty to five o’clock, give or take a half-hour.”

  Ginsburg nodded. “Rush hour. Wouldn’t you know it?”

  “Between four and five-thirty, hm?” Dwight said when Richards called him to report. “Good work, Mayleen. Denning should be there any minute now with the van to take another look at her bedroom. I can’t believe he’ll find anything, but we have to jump through the hoops. Any progress with her laptop?”

  “No, sir. Ginsburg’s going to take it back to Garner with her and put some of her techies to work scanning every file, but it turns out that she had a CD that’s a digital shredder, so she’s not very optimistic.”

  “Yeah. I’m over at Bradshaw Management and our twin’s downloading everything to flash drives for a page-by-page examination, too.”

  “What about the house, sir? The daughter’s pushing to move back in.”

  “You’ve done a thorough search for any papers?”

  “And for CDs and flash drives. Ginsburg and I talked about those ‘fd’ notations on her paper files. Could stand for flash drive. I’m not gonna say she doesn’t have a secret hidey-hole somewhere in the house, but if she does, we haven’t found it and we’ve sure looked.”

  “Clothes pockets in her closet? Plastic bags in her refrigerator? Books?”

  “No books, almost nothing in the refrigerator. No flour or sugar canisters. Cupboards almost bare except for a couple of cereal boxes that only hold cereal. I guess she didn’t cook much either.”

  At that slip of her tongue, Mayleen Richards felt herself flushing a bright red. When Mike didn’t cook, they usually ate takeout, but she had tried to make a rice dish last night and had wound up cooking it to mush. She was mortified, but he had laughed and called in an order for Chinese. “They say it will be twenty minutes,” he had said, pulling her to him.

  She flushed again at the memory. If Major Bryant picked up on that “either,” though, he didn’t mention it.

  “It helps that the house is so new,” she said hastily. “Her daughter says she was pretty ruthless about throwing out the old and starting fresh, so there’s not a ton of stuff to go through. Here’s Denning now.” She gave the department’s crime scene specialist a come-on-in wave of her hand. “I’ll search again while he’s working, but if she used a flash drive, we’re talking something about the size of a lipstick.”

  “I know,” her boss said with an audible sigh. “But we can’t hold things up forever. Did you tell the daughter that Candace was murdered?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Good. Wilson and I’ll go speak with her and her dad and tell them we’re finished with the house.”

  “Hey, Percy,” Agent Sabrina Ginsburg said, automatically fluffing her shoulder-length blond hair.

  “Blondie! My lucky day,” the department’s crime scene specialist said with a big grin. “I’d’ve gotten here quicker if I’d known you were working the house.”

  As if, thought Mayleen, sliding her cell phone back into the holder on her belt. Percy Denning was nice, but nerdy. Ginsburg was sweet, though. She talked enough flirty trash with him to send him on down to the master bedroom with a silly grin on his face.

  “Damn flash drives,” Agent Sabrina Ginsburg said when Richards said she was going to make another search. “If she used one for the illegal stuff and never saved anything to hard drive, we may never find anything if she ran her digital shredder periodically. You look in all her purses? In her lipstick cases? What about drugstore magnifying glasses that come in those pretty little metal cases?”

  She pulled a bright yellow plastic flash drive from her own purse. “I keep all my picture albums on this one. I could hide it anywhere.”

  “Tell me about it,” Richards said wearily. She had a purple one in her shoulder bag that she could use on any computer to jot quick notes to herself for writing up fuller reports. “I wonder if her daughter knows?”

  She pulled out her cell phone, located the number Dee Bradshaw had given her, and put the question to her directly.

  “A flash drive?” asked Dee. “Sure. I gave her one last fall.”

  She didn’t know where her mother kept it, “But if you find it and she hasn’t changed it, the password’s hotwater.”

  “Hot water? All one word?”

  “Right.”

  “The thing is,” said Ginsburg when Richards relayed that information, “it’s been my experience that white-collar criminals usually keep their data handy so they can get at it easily.”

  She had already powered down the laptop and stashed it in the black carrying case, a case that had first been thoroughly searched,
and she had pulled several paper files as well.

  Together, she and Richards examined every inch of the cherry desk, taking out the drawers and looking for evidence of tape on the backs or undersides. They ran their fingers into the crevices of Bradshaw’s padded swivel executive’s chair in case she’d slipped a thin DVD case or flash drive there. The only other places within easy reach were her wastebasket and file cabinet.

  Again, nothing.

  “The drapes?” asked Ginsburg.

  The desk did sit in front of the heavy rose-colored damask drapes, so that the chair faced the door in the opposite wall. Easy to swivel around to a pocket on the backside of the drapes.

  Nada.

  “The chair’s on casters,” Mayleen pointed out, and there was enough space between the desk and wall to roll out while still seated, so they widened the range. Unfortunately, the only other items in the room were the dollhouse, a half-empty chest of drawers, a white velvet love seat that made into a single bed for overnight guests, and a small closet that held four winter coats and jackets.

  Ginsburg swung the dollhouse around on its casters. She hadn’t paid it much attention before and she was charmed by the detailed nursery on the third floor. Not so charmed, however, that she didn’t look under the embroidered white crib blanket or the white satin coverlet on the bed in an adjoining room.

  The chest received the same thorough examination as the desk. Ditto the love seat when they opened it. Ditto the closet. In the end, they even lifted the area rug that sat atop the white Berber carpet. No papers.

  “Maybe Tina’s having more luck at the office,” Ginsburg said when they finally called it quits.

  “Hey, look what my metal detector turned up in her bedroom floor,” Denning said from the doorway. He held out a clear plastic evidence bag and they saw a bullet slug. “The pile’s so thick on that carpet, I missed it completely the first time around.”

  At Bradshaw Management, the interviews with Candace Bradshaw’s office staff had elicited the information that their boss did occasionally use a flash drive when she worked on the computer.

  “Oh, yes,” one of the billing clerks nodded when specifically asked. “You see how her desk faces the door? She said it was feng shui, but I think it was because she didn’t want anybody to ever see what was on her screen. And if you went around her desk to show her a paper or something without being asked, she’d jump down your throat. Sometimes she’d make me wait till she closed whatever was on her screen and she’d unplug her memory stick and put it in her purse or her pocket. She never left it plugged in. Never.”

  “You know something?” said Gracie Farmer when Dwight Bryant and Agent Terry Wilson questioned her again amid the lush tropical decor of her office. “Mindy’s right. I’d forgotten about it.”

  The opening and closing of her door when they entered had set the wooden parrots behind her gently swaying on their perches until Terry almost expected to hear them squawk. As he sat down in a chair near one of the large flowering plants, a leaf brushed his neck and he could not repress an instinctive swat of his hand, as if it had been a tarantula or some sort of equatorial pest.

  “You know how you get so used to seeing somebody do the same thing over and over till you just don’t notice? Candace and I had a lunch meeting with a new client last winter, a twenty-unit rental apartment on North Street. We set it up for one o’clock, but he called us at twelve-twenty, wanting to know where the heck we were because he thought we’d agreed on twelve. We went rushing out and were halfway to the restaurant when she remembered she’d forgotten to pull the flash drive. I couldn’t talk her into waiting. She dropped me at the restaurant and went right back for it. So yeah, whatever she used it for, she sure didn’t want anybody else getting their hands on it.”

  As she spoke, Farmer automatically tidied her desk, squaring the corners of the file folders in front of her, placing paper clips and stray pens in the brightly decorated miniature oxcart that served as the desk’s catchall.

  “She even bought one of those digital shredders on a CD and ran it on her computer a couple of times a week. I just assumed she was being extra careful with confidential board business because there’s no need for anything like that with the business.”

  As she talked, both men were sizing her up. There was nothing she could do about her Jay Leno–size jaw, but she seemed to take pains with her hair and makeup. Although she was a few pounds overweight, today’s colorful outfit consisted of a rainbow-banded peasant skirt, an orange tunic, and a necklace of small wooden multihued flowers. She could have stepped out of one of the Costa Rica travel posters on her wall. Her hands showed her age, though, and her closely trimmed nails gave mute testimony that she could still push a mop or scrub a toilet bowl if need be.

  “What time does the office here close?” Dwight asked.

  The office manager smiled and shook her head. “Technically, it doesn’t. We lock the front door at five and put the regular office phones on automatic answering, but there’s a twenty-four-hour emergency number that tenants can call if a sink backs up or a fuse blows. And our cleaning crews work until nine or so, depending on how many show up on any given evening, which means we have someone here to lock up after they check their vans and equipment back in.”

  “What about you?” said Terry. “What time do you leave?”

  “Depends. Usually around five. Sometimes it’s later, sometimes it’s earlier. If I have to check on a job in Cotton Grove or Makely, I don’t bother to come back here before going home.”

  “And Mrs. Bradshaw?”

  “Again, it depended. We have good people, independent workers. Candace loved to quote Eisenhower: ‘Trust ’em or bust ’em,’ she’d say. I’ve never found it necessary to hold a stopwatch on anybody more than once. Candace pretty much kept the same hours as the rest of us. Once the commissioners made her chairman of the board, though, that did take up a lot of her time. On meeting nights, she usually left at noon to go home and change and read over the agenda items.”

  “That what happened Tuesday?” asked Terry.

  Gracie Farmer nodded. “And if you’re asking me again why she’d leave here perfectly normal and then go home and kill herself, I have to say again I honestly don’t know.”

  She fingered the wooden flowers of her hand-carved necklace and her troubled blue eyes met Dwight’s. “Have you learned anything at all?”

  “Nothing definite.” He shifted in his chair and said, “Who were her friends?”

  The woman knitted her brows. “Close friends? I don’t know if she had any. Not women friends anyhow. There were some women in her party that she would have lunch with once in a while, but someone to sit around and dish the dirt with?” She shook her head. “I told you about her childhood and upbringing. I think she felt inferior because she didn’t come from money and she didn’t have much of an education.”

  She removed a loose thread from the sleeve of her orange tunic. “Poor Candace. I don’t think she really fit in anywhere once she left home and moved to Dobbs. The caste system’s everywhere, isn’t it? The women here in the office tend to look down on the janitorial staff, but once she married Cameron and started working here in the office, she was their boss. She joined the Republican Women and went to all the meetings but if she ever got close to anyone in particular, I never heard her say. Most of them have college degrees and can talk about art and music and things that went over her head.

  “Cameron—Mr. Bradshaw, he tried to educate her taste, but she wasn’t much interested. I think that’s one of the reasons they broke up. She got tired of trying to meet his expectations. I remember once she slammed down the phone on him because she wanted to go to a Willie Nelson concert and he wanted to go to Raleigh to hear some ‘effing harpsichords.’ Those were her very words. I don’t know what she had against harpsichords, but it was about a month later that she filed for divorce.”

  “Which was never finalized,” said Terry Wilson.

  “No. Actually, Cam
eron’s probably the closest thing to the kind of friend you’re asking about. He really is a nice man and once he was out of the house and not trying to improve her mind, she liked him again. It was like he was her favorite uncle.”

  “What about her daughter?”

  “Dee?” Gracie gave a sour laugh. “Dee might have been her ticket to becoming Mrs. Cameron Bradshaw, but Candace was no touchy-feely mommy. Not really her fault though, was it? I don’t know how she could’ve been anything else, coming from the home she did.”

  “What about you, Mrs. Farmer?”

  “Me?” She seemed a bit surprised by that question. “I suppose so. I mean we liked each other, and I guess she talked to me as freely as to anyone else, but . . .” She shrugged. “Again, it’s boss and employee, isn’t it?”

  “You hired her,” Dwight said. “Did you resent it when she became your boss?”

  “No. Not really.” She heard the doubt in her voice and gave a rueful laugh. “Okay, it was a little awkward in the beginning, but I knew way more about this job than she did and she knew it. Once I realized she was here to work and that she would be capable of running it profitably herself, I quit worrying about it. I’m not ambitious, Major Bryant. I live alone. I make a good salary. I’ve had good luck with some of my investments and I don’t care about power. She didn’t have to watch her back with me.”

  “Who did she have to watch?” asked Terry.

  “Nobody, so far as I know. Well, maybe Roger Flackman at first. He’s the accountant Cameron hired to go over the books twice a year. But we keep accurate books and he’s never found that she was holding back so much as a dime. Cameron told me about her letter, though. Is that what you mean? You think someone was going to blow the whistle on her?”

  “Was there a whistle to blow?” asked Dwight.

  She shook her head. “But isn’t that what politics is all about these days? On every level? Both sides playing one long game of gotcha?”

  CHAPTER 10

  No one knows what’s going on. A sense of drama

  Seems inviting, but nothing happens.