Christmas Mourning Read online

  “Thanks. And thanks for the ride.”

  “My pleasure,” I said honestly. “I’m sort of glad your car conked out on you this morning.”

  She laughed. “You know something? I am, too.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Now, being prepared for almost anything, he was not by any means prepared for nothing.

  —A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

  COLLETON COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT—MONDAY MORNING, DECEMBER 22

  Bo Poole leaned back in his black leather chair and listened as his chief deputy filled him in on the shooting deaths of the two Wentworth brothers.

  There was a time when the news media would have been all over this story. An N&O reporter and a photographer would have trundled out from Raleigh, a helicopter from one of the local TV stations would have hovered over the sheeted bodies, and there would have been at least one stringer for the little county newspapers out at the site before the EMS truck got there. Whether the lack of coverage was due to layoffs in staff, the high cost of helicopter fuel, last night’s foul weather, or simply that the deaths of two petty criminals were not worth more than a few inches of newsprint and a scant thirty seconds in the roundup of local news, the department’s spokesperson reported that her online posting of the bare facts had triggered only a couple of phone calls from the media.

  “Richards and Dalton are over there now to see if we missed anything last night, and McLamb’s gone to the autopsy,” Dwight Bryant told his boss, a small trim man with thinning gray hair and sharp bright eyes that missed nothing. “Someone from Welcome Home is going to meet them at the trailer with serial numbers and invoices to ID their stolen merchandise.”

  “How’s Mayleen working out as a detective?” Bo asked. “Her daddy’s still mad with me for giving her a job. Thinks she wouldn’t be hooked up with that Mexican if I’d turned her down.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t. She’s an asset. Good with computers, pulls her weight without grumbling”

  “Her personal life doesn’t get in the way?”

  “Now, Bo, you know well and good I don’t get into that unless it does get in the way. I do know it hurts her that her family won’t accept Mike Diaz, but she doesn’t talk about it unless someone asks.”

  “He good to her?”

  Dwight shook his head. “Tell you what. She should be back before lunch. Want me to have her stop in here and catch you up on her private business?”

  Bo laughed. “Okay, okay. So what about this Victor Wentworth?”

  “I’ve got a call in to Wake County to see if they have a warrant out for him. Not that he’s of concern to us on this.”

  “No, but it’s always good to know,” the sheriff agreed. “Hound dogs like the Wentworths always come crawling back under the house. Wish I could find it in my heart to feel sorry about his boys, but you know good as me, Dwight, they were gonna wind up a drain on the county one way or another.”

  He thumped the files he’d had his secretary pull. Both boys had records. Jason’s was longer, of course. Hunting deer illegally, two speeding tickets, a DWI, a conviction for petty theft, another for assault, and he was currently out on bail awaiting trial for yet another assault. Nineteen years old and he had already been a guest in their jail. With his record, if he had been found guilty for this second assault, he could have pulled real prison time.

  At sixteen, Matt had only three citations as a non-juvenile: one for speeding, one for underage drinking, and one for an altercation in the West Colleton High School parking lot.

  Bo sighed. “Maybe Miz Wentworth was right. Maybe she could’ve stopped him from walking down the same road as his brothers, but I never met a Wentworth I thought I could trust. You?”

  “No,” Dwight admitted. “But they keep on getting themselves killed, we’re gonna run out of Wentworths. And whoever shot these two is just as bad, so we need to find him.”

  “Any connection to the Johnson girl’s death?”

  Dwight shrugged. “I’d really be surprised if he was actually hooked up with her. Mayleen’s interviewed some of the kids and got the names of everyone at the party. His wasn’t one of them. But he did tell his stepmother that she was his girlfriend, and he was as upset after her death as if she really was. Now they’re both dead. Coincidence?”

  “I never much cared for coincidences,” Bo said.

  “Me either. I called my mother first thing this morning. Matt was still a student there. She’s going to pull his attendance record for me. See if he was in school on Friday. I don’t see how the deaths are related, though. It’s more likely that one of them pissed off the killer and Matt was upset because he knew this was coming down the pike toward them.”

  “Which one was the primary target?”

  “Too soon to know,” Dwight said. “But as long as we’re talking coincidence, the older Wentworth boy, Jason? Up until Thanksgiving, he worked for Mallory’s half brother’s grandfather. Her mother’s former father-in-law.”

  “Anybody talked to him yet?”

  “Who? Nelson Barefoot?”

  “Naw. The half brother, what’s-his-name.”

  “Charlie? No. I thought I’d try to get up with him after I talk to Willie Faison. See if there was another reason Faison was at the Wentworth trailer besides what he told the trooper before he passed out.”

  “Be real nice if we could get this all wrapped before Christmas,” the sheriff observed.

  Dwight grinned. “And here I thought you were too old to still believe in Santa Claus.”

  Downstairs, he had the duty officer bring Willie Faison to an interview room, and he looked the young man over carefully when he came in and took a seat across the table.

  Twenty years old. White. No visible tattoos or piercings. Black hair, slender build, an inch or two under six feet. Unmarried. No priors. Currently employed as a plumber’s helper in a small three-man company in Cotton Grove. Despite registering a .10 on the Breathalyzer at the scene of the shooting, the only issue was his age, and even if Ellen Englert Hamilton were sitting in the courtroom, he would receive no more than a suspended sentence. If he could afford the services of a halfway competent attorney, he might even avoid that. With four empty beer cans in his truck, it could be argued that he had not drunk a thing until after finding the bodies.

  Hell, it might even be true.

  On the other hand, he was a full year away from the legal drinking age.

  With the vitality of youth, Faison was clear-eyed and rested after his night in lockup. Dwight advised him of his Miranda rights and he immediately waived them because he was anxious to be released so that he could get to work before his boss docked his wages. He was also still reeling from finding his friend Jason and Jason’s younger brother lying dead on the frozen ground. “I’d been calling him all weekend ’cause I wanted my stuff back and—”

  “Stuff?” Dwight asked him.

  “I mean, my money. The money he owed me.”

  “No, son,” Dwight said mildly. “You said stuff. What stuff?”

  The young man shrugged. “He borrowed some stuff from me.”

  Dwight waited while Faison’s unease became more apparent.

  “A jacket and a pair of coveralls,” he blurted out. “I wanted ’em back.”

  “What else?”

  “That’s all,” he said, not quite meeting Dwight’s steady stare.

  “Why didn’t you take them when you went inside the trailer to call 911?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I was too freaked. I mean, they were out there on the ground in the freezing rain. For all I knew, whoever did that could have still been hanging around. I just wanted to get out of there and get back in my truck. What was so wrong about that? I could’ve just driven off, but I didn’t. I waited till the trooper got there, and what’s the first thing he does? Makes me blow in that damn Breathalyzer with Jason and Matt blown to kingdom come. Where’s my truck anyhow?”

  “Calm down,” Dwight told him. “Your truck’s still out
at the trailer and I can have someone drive you out to get it. First, though, I need you to answer some questions and write out a statement.”

  “And who’s gonna write me an excuse for my boss?” young Faison grumbled, but in the end he was cooperative.

  He described how he and Jason Wentworth had been friends since grade school. They fished and hunted together, played poker and pool with some other guys from Cotton Grove—he wrote down their names. Yes, Jason could be a horse’s ass at times, but on the whole, he was a good guy to watch your back. “Everybody liked ol’ Jase.”

  “What about that assault charge?” Dwight asked him.

  “The guy that swore out a warrant on him? Hell, he was the one threw the first punch. Jason was just defending himself.”

  “What about the things in the shed back of the trailer?”

  Faison frowned. “What things?”

  “The lawn mowers and tools y’all stole from the Welcome Home store.”

  “No way, man! That was nothing to do with me.”

  “You knew about it, though, didn’t you?”

  “Not till last week when he wanted me to help him sell it. He thought some of the guys on my crew would want to buy a cheap push mower. Look, yeah, maybe I used to do stuff like that with Jase, but not anymore. I got a good job and a girlfriend. My aunt says we can live with her till we can get a place of our own.”

  “When did you last see him?”

  “Monday when he came by and I loaned him that cold-weather gear.”

  “Not since then?”

  “Not to see. I talked to him on the phone Thursday night. He said he’d drop my things off on Friday, but he never showed or called or nothing. I kept calling, but he wouldn’t pick up.”

  He finished writing out his statement about finding the bodies around ten, dated and signed it, then slid it back across the table.

  “I hope y’all locked my truck and left somebody out there to guard it. It’s got my tools and my guns.”

  “About those guns,” Dwight said.

  Faison was instantly wary. “Yeah?” he asked cautiously.

  “I had them brought in so we could examine them more closely. We’re not going to find that one of them is the gun that shot those two boys, are we?”

  “Hell, no! No way in this world, man!” He pushed his chair back till he almost banged into the rear wall in an abrupt and involuntary denial.

  “So tell me about them,” Dwight said.

  Faison’s jaw tightened in mulish denial. “Nothing to tell.”

  “Fine. We’ll just wait and see what my detective finds to tell me. I’ll let the officer know you’re ready to go back to your cell.”

  “Wait a minute! Don’t I get a phone call?”

  “Sure. You want to call your mama or your boss or your attorney? ’Cause it looks like you’re going to be here for a while.”

  The youth slumped back in his chair. “Okay, okay. I loaned Jason one of my rifles to go deer hunting. Big damn deal. He saw a big buck last week and wanted to bag it before the season ended.”

  Dwight gave a cynical shake of his head. “He was worried about the end of deer season when he shouldn’t have been hunting in the first place? He’d already lost both his own gun and his hunting license.”

  “That’s why he needed to borrow mine. My gun, I mean. Not my license. I wouldn’t give him that.”

  “Matt told his stepmother they were going to use his friend Willie’s deer stand over near Clayton. Your stand?”

  “Huh? No, I don’t have no stand.”

  “So you weren’t with them Wednesday morning?”

  Faison stared at him blankly. “Wednesday morning?” he said slowly. “No, man, I was working all day Wednesday.”

  Dwight had the feeling that he was missing something, but Faison had settled on that story. He had lent Jason a rifle and that’s why he was out at the trailer last night. The gun and the hunting cap were all he’d taken from the place. He hadn’t seen Jason since he borrowed the gun on Monday, honest, and now could he please make that phone call?

  Dwight instructed the officer to take Faison before the magistrate on duty and get her to set his bail. “And then let him use the phone.”

  With a little luck, Willie Faison could still get in half a morning’s work.

  Back upstairs, Dwight stuck his head into the room that Percy Denning had fitted up as a lab so that not every single piece of evidence had to go to the SBI’s lab in Garner. “You can compare the prints on Faison’s guns with those of the two victims,” he said. “Faison says he lent one to Wentworth. And anything on the shell casing you found?”

  “It’s a .32. We’ll have to wait and see what the ME finds in the bodies.”

  A handgun then, and not a rifle.

  “Richards called. She and Dalton just dug a slug out of the side of the trailer that’s consistent with the line of fire. Says it looks like a .32 to her, too.”

  “Jason Wentworth have a cell phone?”

  “I didn’t see one. Want me to call Richards and ask?”

  “Yeah. And check if there’s a land line. See who called him the last few days.”

  He started to leave, then paused. “What about the Johnson girl’s phone?”

  “Not much on it. She must have cleared its memory earlier that evening. We’ve asked for the records, though, and the company’s promised to email them to us today.”

  “When they come, see if any of the called numbers correspond to a phone connected with Matt Wentworth’s name, okay? He told his stepmother that Mallory Johnson was his girlfriend.”

  Denning rolled his eyes. “In that case, there’ll be at least eight or ten calls a day to him.”

  Dwight grinned. Denning had a teenage daughter.

  Twenty-five minutes later, after making a few phone calls of his own, Dwight turned into one of the older neighborhoods on the edge of Cotton Grove. This street had attractive, well-maintained homes, each on a spacious landscaped lot, each surrounded by mature oaks and maples. Unfortunately, last night’s ice storm had laid one of those tall oaks across the roof of a two-story brick house and there was a gaping hole where one of the branches had broken into the attic.

  Dwight pulled in behind a truck whose panel door read “Barefoot Roofing Company” and got out to join the group of people who stood watching as a man with a chainsaw cut up a tree that would easily measure two feet in diameter. He expected to recognize Nelson Barefoot from his high school years of playing basketball with Jeff Barefoot, and he was fairly certain that one of the men was an adjuster from Triple J Insurance, but he was surprised when the owners of the house turned as he approached and greeted him by name.

  “Well, hey, Dwight!” Diane Hobbs called above the ear-piercing whine of the chainsaw. “You come to watch the fun?”

  Her husband, Randy, an older man and a former magistrate, stepped forward to shake his hand. “Haven’t seen you since my retirement party, young man,” he said loudly. “How’s life at the courthouse these days?”

  “Not half as exciting as this,” Dwight told him, gesturing toward the roof and the tree that was rapidly becoming a pile of firewood and sawdust. The clean acrid smell of freshly cut oak drifted on the morning air.

  “Did you ever see such a mess?” asked Diane, who had a closer acquaintance with the tall deputy.

  Abruptly, the chainsaw went silent as the workman paused to stack the logs he had cut from the branches and to roll the larger rounds out of his way.

  Petite and bubbly with brown hair and snapping brown eyes, Diane Hobbs was the hygienist at Dwight’s dentist. Twice a year, he leaned back in that padded chair and opened wide so that she could poke around with a pickax and jackhammer and scold him for not flossing twice a day. “And don’t think I can’t tell, mister.”

  Up on the roof, one of Barefoot’s men was clearing away the fast-melting ice while another used a broom to sweep aside the water before it could drip into the attic and soak through the ceiling below.

/>   “That’s our bedroom there on the corner,” Diane said, loosening the buttons of her bright red jacket as the sun warmed up the morning air. “When that tree hit in the middle of the night, I thought we’d been bombed or something. Thank goodness the weather’s supposed to stay mild and sunny through the weekend. It won’t feel much like Christmas, but at least our bedroom won’t get soaked. And this nice man’s going to make it all good as new by Christmas morning, aren’t you?”

  She gave Nelson Barefoot a winning smile, but he was not willing to commit to her agenda.

  “Now, honey,” said Randy Hobbs. “You know that Carl here’s got to give us an insurance estimate first.”

  “I do know that,” she said sweetly, “but you know it’s got to be done no matter what Carl’s estimate and you also know Mr. Barefoot’s the best roofer in the county, and we don’t want to mess around with second best, now do we?”

  Amused, Dwight watched Diane finish wrapping her husband and Nelson Barefoot around her little finger and heard the big gruff man allow as how he reckoned he could get on it tomorrow or the next day.

  “We’ll let the sun finish drying it good today,” he said, “and I’ll send one of my boys over this afternoon to put a tarp over it from the ridgepole down so y’all won’t have to look at the stars tonight.”

  “Stars?” Diane glanced at her husband. Her face was serious, but her eyes sparkled with mischief. “Long as the hole’s already there, honey, why don’t we let’s put in a great big skylight so we can lie in bed and watch the moon?”

  “Moon?” Randy yelped. “Skylight?”

  “Oh, no, now, Miz Hobbs,” Barefoot said, tilting his brown felt hat back on his head. “There’s no way I can put you in a skylight before the first of the year and you’re not gonna want to live with that hole that long, are you?”

  “I guess you’re right,” she said, feigning reluctance to give up the idea. “So you’ll definitely be here tomorrow to fix it back the way it was?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  As Barefoot moved away to speak to his men, Hobbs said, “You wanted to ask me about something, Dwight?”