The Buzzard Table Read online

  He reached for his phone again and was soon talking to his sister-in-law. “Kate?”

  “Hey, Dwight. Cal just told us his news. That’s so great.”

  “Thanks, but that’s not why I called.”

  “You’re going to be late picking him up?”

  “No, I was wondering if you’d do me a big favor.”

  “Sure, what is it?”

  “Could you invite Deborah and me to supper tonight? Along with Sigrid and Anne and their cousin? And make it sound as if it’s your idea, not mine?”

  “Are you serious?”

  “I know it’s short notice, but—”

  “Dwight, you do know it’s Valentine’s Day, don’t you?”

  “Oh, damn! I’m sorry, Kate. I guess you and Rob already made plans?”

  “Actually, we didn’t, but we’re an old married couple. You and Deborah are still newlyweds. Aren’t you taking her out to dinner?”

  “Nope. Lucky for me, she doesn’t seem to care about Valentine’s Day.”

  Kate laughed. “Okay, you bring the beer and I’ll see if I can round up the others.”

  As he left the parking lot, Deputy McLamb remembered that he was supposed to interview Richard Williams, the Methodist youth minister who was mentoring Jeremy Harper. On the off chance that he would be at home this late in the day, McLamb parked in front of the house on a side street a few blocks from the church and was gratified when Williams himself came to the door.

  “Well, hey there, Ray,” he said jovially, reaching for the younger man’s hand and pulling him into the house. “Carolyn, look who’s here! It’s Sister Alice McLamb’s grandson.”

  Stunned, McLamb said, “You remember me? It’s been over twenty years.”

  “I never forget the good kids,” Williams said. “Besides, I see your grandmother at least twice a year and she always talks about you and shows me the pictures of you and your children.”

  He led McLamb into the dining room, where his wife was tying red bows on a dozen or more white milk-glass bud vases. Each vase held three red carnations and some greenery. The table was littered with flowers, stems, stray leaves, and snippets of red ribbon. Several sheets of heart-shaped stickers waited to be stuck on the trailing ends of the ribbons.

  Carolyn Williams welcomed him with a warm smile. She had a long attractive face topped with soft gray curls cut very short.

  “Don’t mind the mess,” she apologized. “We’re just finishing up the last of the Valentine flowers for the geriatric ward out at the hospital.”

  As a child, McLamb had often attended his grandmother’s AME church here in Dobbs. Several times a year, Williams would come over to hold storytelling sessions for the children. McLamb’s favorites featured a character the youth minister had invented: Herman the Worm, who wiggled his way into all sorts of adventures. He would tuck the tip of his tongue down between his lower lip and teeth so that “Herman” spoke with a very thick accent that children found irresistibly funny.

  “Do you need to speak privately?” Mrs. Williams asked.

  “No, I’m just backtracking on the Harper boy. We wondered if he said anything, anything at all that might help us understand why someone tried to kill him?”

  Williams smoothed back his rumpled white hair. “I’m sorry, Ray. He was bitter about his brother’s death and his parents’ divorce, and he really wanted to shut down that airfield, but on a personal level?” He shook his head.

  “If you do think of anything,” McLamb said.

  “Of course. Now, can’t we give you a glass of tea or a cookie?”

  McLamb shook his head. “Thanks, but y’all need to finish up and I need to get to a florist before it closes.”

  “For your wife?” Carolyn Williams asked.

  He nodded.

  Husband and wife exchanged glances and Richard Williams thrust one of the bud vases in his hands.

  McLamb breathed in their spicy scent. “Oh, I couldn’t.”

  “Thure you can,” the older man said in his Herman voice. He pulled a “Be Mine” heart-shaped sticker off the sheet and stuck it on the collar of McLamb’s jacket. “Abby Balentime’s Day!”

  Normally when he got to Kate and Rob’s house to pick up Cal, Dwight would just tap his horn, open the truck door for his son, and wave to Kate or the nanny. Today, he got out of the truck and reached for the doorbell just as Cal pulled it open, one arm in his jacket, his backpack slung over the other shoulder and clutching a folder made of red construction paper that was leaking shiny valentines.

  Kate followed him down the hall and helped him pick them up. “Sorry, Dwight. We didn’t hear your horn.”

  “I didn’t blow it,” he said.

  She handed Cal a half dozen cards and smiled at her brother-in-law. “Anne and Sigrid are up for tonight. In fact, Anne sounded happy to be able to talk to you face-to-face. She’s feeling guilty about the Harper boy.”

  “What about Crawford?”

  “I left him a message on his voice mail, but I haven’t heard back yet. I told them all seven o’clock.”

  “Thanks, Kate.”

  “If you can’t find a sitter, bring Cal back with you and he can spend the night here.”

  CHAPTER

  24

  There are a few reports of the species killing live prey, but such reports are rare.

  —The Turkey Vulture Society

  February 14 has never been a big deal for me since the year Mason Faircloth gave Caroline Atherton a dollar valentine with a satin heart on it, while the one he stuck in my construction-paper mailbox came from a package of “25 for $2.50” with their one-size-fits-all sentiments. I was nine years old and my heart was broken.

  Mother didn’t laugh at me when she found me in tears after school, but she did go through all the cards I’d gotten and made me stop and think about the handmade ones. “These are the ones that came from the heart,” she told me. “Not the Hallmark ones.”

  As far as she was concerned, birthdays, weddings, funerals, and Christmas were the only legitimate occasions for sending cards, and then only to people who didn’t live under her roof. Even Mother’s Day was a commercial ploy to guilt people into spending money.

  It’s made me cynical about the public display of roses and tulips that arrive at the courthouse on birthdays, anniversaries, and Valentine’s Day. I suspect that more than one woman orders them for herself so that everyone will think she has a romantic husband.

  All the same, I admit that I bought a couple of chocolate éclairs sprinkled with red candy hearts for Dwight and Cal, and I was delighted with the valentine Cal made for us with “Dad and Mom” spelled out in red crayon on the front.

  I was less delighted to hear that Dwight had accepted an invitation to Kate and Rob’s for supper with Sigrid and her mother, even though he sweetened the announcement with a new charm for my silver bracelet: the silhouette of a boy’s head, engraved with Cal’s initials and the date of his birth.

  “Your idea or Kate’s?” I asked.

  “The bracelet or supper?”

  “Both.”

  “Mine. Sorry.”

  “Still baiting your hooks?”

  “Can’t catch anything if you don’t have a line in the water,” he admitted. “And it won’t hurt to have another professional’s eye on the cork. Sigrid did say she wanted to see how we ran things down here.”

  I immediately started calling around the farm for a babysitter and got lucky on my first try. My brother Zach’s daughter Emma agreed to come over, and her brother Lee said he wasn’t doing anything either, so if there was going to be free pizza…

  In the end, it cost us two large pizzas, because Emma called back within the hour to say Seth’s daughter Jess and Andrew’s Ruth wanted to come, too. Wherever two or three of the kids are gathered, more of my nieces and nephews are sure to turn up. Evidently the tribal grapevine was working just fine, because I was able to tell Cal, “They said they’d be happy to stay with their new cousin.”

&n
bsp; We were the first to get to Rob and Kate’s and she was apologetic. “Sorry, Dwight, but Martin Crawford begged off and I didn’t know how much you wanted me to push it.”

  “That’s okay,” he told her.

  Sigrid and Anne blew in about two minutes later, red-cheeked and hair tousled by the wind. We shed our heavy coats and soon sat down to an informal supper of Rob’s hearty beef stew with a few bottles of Dwight’s homemade ale, perfect for a cold winter’s night.

  “I don’t normally like beer, but this is quite good,” Sigrid said, wiping the foam from her upper lip. She was as relaxed as we’d yet seen her, but the death watch was starting to wear on both of them.

  “Grandmother doesn’t seem to be in too much pain. The doctor’s put her on an intravenous pump with a mixture of something that makes her sleep a lot.”

  “My sisters are flying in the end of the week,” said Anne, who was further worried that something she had said or done might have led to the attack on Jeremy Harper. “I spoke to Mrs. Harper this afternoon. She says he tried to squeeze her hand and that his eyelids fluttered a little. I don’t know if it’s wishful thinking or he really is starting to come around.”

  “Where’s your investigation going?” Sigrid asked with professional interest. “Any leads?”

  “Not really,” Dwight said. “We found his Toyota over by the NutriGood store on Saturday morning. “Unfortunately, no one seems to know when it was parked there.”

  “Could he have gone straight there after leaving us on Thursday, or do you think somebody else drove it there later?” Anne asked.

  “No telling, but we’ve asked the media to run our hotline number in case anyone noticed. The steering wheel wasn’t wiped and it’s covered with his fingerprints.”

  Anne sprinkled pepper on her stew and described some of the adventures she’d had over the years, adventures she’d told the Harper boy about. “I wanted to give him a sense of the opportunities out there if he was persistent and determined. Now I’m wondering if I gave him an unrealistic view of how willing some people are to answer awkward questions.”

  Sigrid took another swallow of beer. “I know Martin found him near where that real estate woman was dumped, but is there any real connection?”

  “Not that we’ve found, and believe me, we’ve looked.”

  “What about your cousin?” I asked.

  Anne made a rueful face. “I’m afraid he was no help at all. He showed us some pictures and talked about tracking vultures, and Jeremy found it about as exciting as watching paint dry. To be fair, though, he’s on a tight deadline and his editor’s bugging him to finish the article.”

  She broke off a piece of her crusty whole wheat roll and buttered it. “He wants to get it finished before he flies back to England.”

  “He’s leaving?” Sigrid asked, looking a little surprised.

  “If you don’t mind my asking,” Dwight said, including Sigrid in his question, “how much do y’all know about him?”

  “What do you mean?” Anne asked.

  “Well, the other night, you said you hadn’t seen him since y’all were kids, and it was almost like Sigrid never even knew he existed. You sure he’s who he says he is?”

  Anne frowned. “Well of course, he is,” she said. “Who else would he be?”

  “Just askin’,” Dwight drawled.

  “I may not have been in touch with him, but Mother certainly was. Not with Martin himself, perhaps, but she and his stepmother exchange Christmas cards and pictures every year. Of course it’s Martin.”

  Sigrid had been watching Dwight’s face, and now she leaned forward to say, “Something about him bothers you, Dwight?”

  He nodded, then looked around the table. “What I say stays here, okay? A man died out at the Clarenden Motel Thursday night. They’re calling it an accident, so the news media haven’t paid much attention to it, but I’m thinking it looks more like murder.”

  Anne was bewildered. “What does that have to do with Martin?”

  “Maybe nothing, but he’s been seen loitering in the area of the airstrip and the dead man was a pilot. Not that they’re admitting it.”

  Sigrid’s gray eyes sharpened with interest. “Who’s ‘they’?”

  “The FBI. A field agent showed up about a half hour after we did and claimed jurisdiction. I reached out to some of my old Intelligence buddies and they say he does some of those rendition flights between Guantanamo Bay and Maine that they try to pretend don’t happen. I checked the weather reports and Maine was iced in Thursday night, so he had to stay over. The maid found him in the tub with the shower on next morning. It was supposed to look as if he slipped and broke his neck in the fall, but our ME thinks he was murdered.”

  Rob and Kate had been following the conversation as if watching a tennis match between the two of them.

  “Someone snapped his neck?” Sigrid asked. “How could they call it an accident? Doesn’t that leave bruises?”

  “Not necessarily,” Dwight said. “Not if it happens too fast for the blood vessels to react.”

  Rob looked at Dwight in something between morbid fascination and awe. “You could do that?”

  “In theory, yes,” Dwight admitted. “If you’re asking if I ever did, the answer’s no.”

  “It isn’t just theory,” Anne said quietly. “I saw it done.”

  We all stared at her.

  “In Somalia,” she said. “Almost twenty years ago.”

  We listened, fascinated as she told us about going into Mogadishu with some UN peacekeepers on a humanitarian trip. “Conditions were horrendous, but it was supposed to be safe as long as we were careful. That’s where I took the picture that won me my second Pulitzer.”

  She described how she had gone to one of the outlying camps with a couple of truckloads of food and medical supplies and how they were ambushed and everyone killed except a fellow journalist.

  “I was sure they were going to kill us, too, especially when two rough-looking Arabs came into the hut. Instead, one of them distracted our guard and then the other one came up behind him and broke his neck.”

  With a few graceful motions, she pantomimed reaching up under the guard’s arm, then locking her hands on the back of his neck to force his head forward and down in a strong sharp yank. “I’ll never forget the sound the bones in his neck made when they cracked. He was dead before he hit the ground.”

  She took a deep breath as if to dispel the memory. “They sneaked us out in burkas and got us back to the city. The man that killed the guard even saved one of my cameras. The one with the Pulitzer picture. He— Oh sweet Jesus!”

  All the blood drained from her face as she broke off and looked at Sigrid in shock.

  “What?” Sigrid asked in alarm.

  “Martin,” Anne whispered. “That Arab was Martin.”

  She gripped the edge of the table with both hands as if to steady herself. I pushed her water glass closer while the others pelted her with exclamations and questions.

  She swallowed some water and we watched the color slowly return to her lovely face.

  “Are you sure, Mother?” Sigrid asked.

  “Remember when he came to dinner last week and I asked him if we’d met before? How he looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him? And when we saw him the next day, he’d shaved off his beard. I remember noticing that Arab’s eyes. Martin’s eyes. I’m positive it was him.”

  “But why wouldn’t he have told you who he was?” Kate asked.

  “If he was in deep cover, it could’ve compromised his mission,” Dwight said. “Sounds to me like he took a serious risk to rescue you.”

  “Deep cover?” Sigrid frowned. “He’s a spy? CIA?”

  “I’m thinking more like MI6. The real MI6, not James Bond.”

  “But he’s an ornithologist,” I protested. “He writes books, leads bird tours.”

  “Perfect cover,” Dwight said. “Professional spies often have degrees in specialized fields—something that gives them
a legitimate reason to be in a foreign country. Stinking buzzards make as good a reason as anything else.”

  There was shocked silence as his words sank in, then Sigrid said, “Dwight, there’s something I didn’t tell you when you asked Martin if he’d been the one to call in the body of that dead woman.”

  She seemed slightly embarrassed. “I’m a police officer. I know better, but it really didn’t seem important at the time.”

  “What didn’t?” Dwight asked.

  “You asked to see his phones and he showed you two of them. But he had at least a half dozen more in a satchel in his bedroom.”

  She described how Crawford had diverted their attention with the old newspapers plastered on the wall while he covered up the phones.

  “I was pretty sure he’d reported the body, but I honestly thought he denied it because he just didn’t want to get involved in a homicide investigation.”

  Anne appeared bewildered. “I never even noticed.”

  “You also didn’t notice that you told him the dates you were in Peru so that he could claim that’s when he was there, too,” Sigrid said.

  Anne leaned back in her chair and looked at Dwight with troubled eyes. “Did Martin kill that pilot? Why? And why hurt Jeremy?”

  “Whoa, now,” Dwight said. “Let’s don’t go jumping to conclusions here. Just because you think he might have killed a guard twenty years ago doesn’t mean that he’s the one who did that pilot yesterday. And don’t forget that Crawford’s the one who found the Harper kid and reported it in time to save his life.”

  (“That’s right!” said the preacher, who likes to think the best of people.)

  (“Unless,” said the cynical pragmatist, who often thinks the worst, “he felt that the boy might never regain consciousness and that calling for medical help would automatically shift suspicion away from him.”)