Winter's Child Read online

  Dwight waited while she took a Milk-Bone from the cut-glass candy dish in the center of the table and gave it to the dog.

  “Tell me about this evening,” he said.

  “There’s really not much to tell.” She lifted the mug to her pale lips, then set it down again. Despite her obvious distress, though, she was able to convey a good sense of the circumstances. “It’s so cold that the wind made my eyes water. I had picked up what little there was on the eastbound side and we were on our way back down the westbound side. It was too early for what you’d call rush hour out here and the road doesn’t get all that much traffic anyhow. There’s only fourteen houses till you get to this subdivision, and most of the people who live here and work in Raleigh usually take Old Forty-Eight. It’s a little more direct, although enough do use Rideout.

  Maybe because it’s still country along here? Used to be an older man who would park out of sight of any houses and have himself a couple of beers before going home and he’d just dump the evidence on the shoulder. When I called him on it, he apologized and started getting out and hiding his empties in the trunk. And another time—oh, but why am I going on like this? You don’t want to hear about litterbugs. You want to know about tonight.”

  Dwight smiled encouragingly, knowing how some people have to take a running start to launch into the horror of what they have witnessed.

  “Anyhow, I was fishing a McDonald’s bag out of the ditch when I heard the truck coming. About the time it got even with me, I heard a loud bang. Like a backfire or something. And then the truck just rolled on off the road. I thought maybe it’d blown a tire.”

  She hesitated and looked at him. “I was wrong, though, wasn’t I? I hear enough hunters, and the Colonel was in the infantry. It was a gunshot, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Dwight. “I’m afraid so.”

  Her hand shook as she tried to bring the mug to her lips again.

  “Could you tell where the shot came from?” he asked.

  “Which side of the road?”

  “Which side?” She considered for a long moment, then shook her head. “I’m sorry, Major Bryant. It happened so fast. The truck. The bang. The crash. All I know is that it came from behind me somewhere, but whether it was from the woods or the Johnson farm, I just can’t say.”

  J.D. Rouse’s place of residence was a whole different experience from Mrs. Harper’s tidy home.

  Three generations ago, this had been a modest farm, but dividing the land among six children, none of whom wanted to farm, had reduced the current generation’s holdings to less than two acres. A typical eastern Carolina one-story clapboard farmhouse in bad need of paint stood amid mature oaks and pecan trees at the front of the lot. Dwight seemed to recall that the house was now inhabited by Rouse’s widowed mother and older sister.

  Behind it lay a dilapidated hay barn, and farther down the rutted driveway was a shabby double-wide that had been parked out in what was once a tobacco field. The mobile home was sheltered by a single pine tree that had no doubt planted itself, since his headlights revealed no other trees or shrubs in the yard to indicate an interest in landscaping.

  Weather-stained and sun-faded plastic toys littered the yard along with abandoned buckets, and his lights picked up a vacant dog pen and the rusted frame of a child’s swing set. The original swings were long gone, replaced 1 with a single tire suspended by a rope. It swayed a little in the icy wind. An old Toyota sedan sat on concrete blocks off to the side, and more blocks served as makeshift steps. When he knocked on the metal door, it rattled in its frame like ice cubes in an empty glass. The place was dark inside and no one responded. He went back to his truck and tapped the horn.

  Nothing.

  As he started back down the rutted drive, he saw that the back-porch light had come on at the old Rouse home and a heavyset woman was standing in the open doorway, so he turned into the yard beside the back door and got out to speak to her.

  It had been years since they had been in school together and he was not sure whether or not this was J.D. Rouse’s sister. The Marsha Rouse he remembered had been beanpole skinny, with long brown hair. This woman was carrying at least sixty extra pounds and her short hair was bright orange. She wore baggy gray knit pants and a thick black sweater over a bright purple turtleneck, and she hunched into her clothes with her arms folded across her ample chest as if to stay warm.

  If she recognized him here in the darkness, it was not evident by the suspicious tone in her voice as he approached. “You looking for J.D.? He ain’t home yet.”

  “Marsha?” he asked.

  She peered at him more closely as he stepped into the light. “Dwight? Dwight Bryant? Lord, it must be a hundred years since I seen you. What brings you out here?

  J.D. in trouble again?”

  “I was hoping to speak to his wife, but she doesn’t seem to be at home.”

  “Naw, she’s left him. Packed up the girls this morning and went to her brother’s. Is that what you’re here about? She take out papers on him this time?”

  “This time?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “J.D.’s got a temper. Always did. And he can have a mean streak when he gets to drinking too much. Is that why you want to see him?”

  Dwight hesitated. A victim’s next of kin was usually the first one to be notified, but Marsha was his sister, while his wife was who knows where.

  “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Marsha, but J.D.’s dead.”

  “What?”

  “Somebody shot him about an hour ago.”

  “Shot him? Oh my God! Who?”

  “We don’t know yet. He was in his truck on Rideout Road when a bullet came through the back window. We don’t even know if it was an accident or deliberate.”

  An elderly woman in a blue cardigan over a print housedress appeared in the doorway behind Rouse’s sister. She was pushing an aluminum walker and shuffled along in thick woolly bedroom slippers. “Marsha? Who you talking to? And how come you’re standing out in that cold with the door wide open? You won’t raised in no barn.”

  “Go back inside, Mama,” Marsha said harshly. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

  She pulled the door closed and shook her head at Dwight. “This is going to pure out kill her. She thinks J.D. hung the moon.”

  “You don’t sound like you think he did,” said Dwight.

  “Easy enough to be the favorite if you bring her a But-1 terfinger every week and sweet-talk her for two minutes and then don’t lift your finger to do a damn thing to help out the rest of the time. Nita does more for her than he ever does and she’s a Mexican.”

  “Nita?”

  “J.D.’s wife.”

  “J.D. have anybody gunning for him that you know of?”

  “Nita’s brother maybe? He cussed J.D. out in Mexican and said he’d put a beating on him if he ever hit Nita or the kids again. But that was just talk. He’s not even tall as me. J.D. punched him in the face and that was two months ago. Mexicans, they got hot tempers, too, and I don’t know as he’d wait two months and then come after him with a gun, do you? Less’n Nita got him riled up today?”

  Dwight sighed and asked for directions to Nita Rouse’s brother’s house.

  “What about J.D., Dwight? What’ll I tell Mama when she wants to know where he is?”

  Dwight explained the need for an autopsy before the body could be released for burial and promised that someone would notify the family.

  Back at the site of the wreck, more people on their way home had stopped to gawk and ask questions. The crime scene van was there now and Percy Denning had set up floodlights to facilitate taking pictures that might one day bolster the State’s case against the shooter. Assuming they could find him.

  Or her, thought Dwight with a wry tip of his hat to his wife. Not that he needed Deborah’s opinionated reminder that women are just as capable of murder as men.

  He watched as Rouse’s body was moved to the rescue truck to be transported to the m
edical examiner in Chapel Hill.

  Among his officers working the scene was Deputy Mayleen Richards and he motioned to her. “You speak Spanish, don’t you?”

  Tall and sturdily built with a face full of freckles inherited from her redheaded father, the younger woman nodded. “A little. I’ve been taking lessons out at Colleton Community.”

  “Way the state’s going, I probably ought to join you,”

  he said. “How ’bout you come with me to tell his wife she’s a widow now? I understand she’s Mexican.”

  “Sure,” said Richards, grateful that darkness hid the hot flush she had felt in her cheeks when he spoke of joining her in Spanish class.

  She lifted her head to the cold north wind, grateful for its bite, and started toward the patrol unit she and Jamison had driven out from Dobbs, but her boss gestured toward his truck. “Ride with me and I’ll tell you what we have so far.”

  With a flaming red face, Richards did as she was told.

  Stop it, she told herself as she opened the passenger door of the truck. He’s married now. To the woman everybody says he’s loved for years. She’s a judge. She’s smart andshe’s beautiful. The only thing he cares about you is whetheryou do the job right.

  Nevertheless, as he turned the key in the ignition, she could not suppress the surge of happiness she felt sitting there beside him.

  C H A P T E R

  2

  He greeted me courteously, and after he had spoke of theweather and the promise of the sky, he mentioned, incidentally, that he was going to Paris.

  —Robert Neilson Stephens

  After court adjourned that chilly Thursday evening, I killed time till my meeting with a quick visit to my friend Portland Brewer, who was still on ma-ternity leave from the law practice she shares with her husband, Avery.

  Carolyn Deborah Brewer is about eighteen hours younger than my nearly one-month marriage to Dwight Bryant, and I was still enchanted with both of them. She’s twenty-one inches long, has fuzzy little black curls all over her tiny head, and smells of baby powder. He’s six-three, has a head of thick brown hair, and smells of Old Spice. I love kissing both, but only one kisses back, and as soon as my meeting adjourned a little after eight, I phoned to let that one know I was on my way.

  “I was just about to call you,” he said. “I’m running late, too. Want me to pick up something for supper?”

  “We still have half of that roast chicken and some gravy from yesterday,” I reminded him. “Hot sandwiches and a green salad?”

  “Sounds good to me. I’ll be there as soon as I drop Richards off and see if Denning has anything else for us right now.”

  I rang off without asking questions. Denning? That meant a crime scene. And if he had Richards with him, that meant at least one other detective on the scene with Denning.

  Which all added up to something serious.

  I’m as curious as the next person—“Curious?” say my brothers. “Try nosy.”—but a cell phone is not the best place to ask questions. If the incident was something Dwight could tell me about, he would be more open face-to-face over a hot meal.

  I’m a district court judge, he’s chief deputy of the Colleton County Sheriff’s Department, which generates a large proportion of the cases that get tried in our judicial district. We had forged a separation of powers treaty shortly after our engagement back in October—he doesn’t talk about things that have a chance of showing up in my courtroom, I don’t ask questions till after they are disposed of, and everyone at the courthouse knows not to schedule me for any district court cases where he has to testify. Fortunately, most of Dwight’s work concerns major felonies that are automatically tried in supe-rior court, so we actually have more freedom of communication than we had originally expected.

  We got home about the same time, and as we put together a supper of leftovers, he told me about the killing.

  I was surprised, but not really shocked to hear that J.D.

  Rouse had been shot. He was a couple of years ahead of me in school and his reputation was already unsavory back then. As a teenager, I may have flirted around with 1 a lot of pot-smoking, beer-drinking boys—the wild boys who drove too fast, sassed the teachers, and cared more about carburetors and carom shots than physics and phi-losophy, but they were basically good-hearted slackers, loyal to their friends.

  Wild is one thing, mean is a whole ’nother ball game.

  J.D. was one of those guys who would get a pal drunk and then use him for a urinal. He was a bully and a sex-ual predator who loved to brag about the girls he’d gone down on, but he had a quick tongue that his buddies found funny when it was turned on someone else and he was good-looking enough that the mirror didn’t crack every time he combed his hair.

  When I wouldn’t go out with him, he tried to hassle me, but I just stared him down and he suddenly remembered whose daughter I was. With several older brothers still living at home and a father who had a reputation for taking care of those who crossed him, my firepower was a lot stronger than his. I think he managed to scrape through high school, and someone said he joined the Army. That was the last time I gave him a thought till he turned up on a speeding charge in my courtroom a couple of years ago. It was not old home week but I did grant the prayer for judgment continued he asked for.

  He still wasn’t high on my radar screen until this past Thanksgiving when he was charged for beating up on his wife. Despite the bruises on her face and the testimony of the officer who had responded to the 911 call, the woman, a pretty young Mexican with almost no English, refused to testify against him. There was a time when a battered woman could be swayed by her man’s sweet talk and “take up the charges,” which meant that she would be fined court costs for her “frivolous prosecution” while he walked free.

  No more. If an officer charges a man with assault on a female, that man will stand trial, and if convicted, faces a maximum sentence of 150 days in jail plus a hefty fine.

  The arresting officer testified that there were two little girls in the home and that Rouse appeared to be their only support. In broken English, his wife begged me not to send him to jail, that it was all a misunderstanding.

  You never know if a stern sentence and sizable fine will get someone’s attention or whether it’ll simply stress him out so that he hammers on his family even more. Because this was Rouse’s first documented offense, I lowballed it and gave him thirty days suspended for a year, fined him a hundred dollars and court costs (another hundred), and required him to complete an anger management program at the mental health clinic there in Dobbs.

  “Big waste of time,” I told Dwight. “A person has to want to change for the program to do any good and I figured J.D. was going to have to piss off somebody a whole lot meaner than himself for that to happen.” I put the skin and bones of the leftover roast chicken in a pot with celery and onions to boil up for stock, and shredded the rest of the meat. “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to hear his shooting was no accident.”

  “Be awfully coincidental for a hunter’s stray bullet,”

  Dwight said as he put bread into the four-slice toaster someone had given us as a wedding present. “One slice or two?”

  “One,” I said virtuously.

  “I’ll get people out walking along the woods and the pasture first thing tomorrow, but we’ll have to wait for 1 the ME to tell us if the track of the bullet veers to the left or right enough to indicate which side of the road the shot came from. I’m betting on the woods.”

  “Because that woman picking up litter didn’t see him?”

  “And he must not’ve seen her. Or else didn’t care because he was so well hidden.” He shook his head pes-simistically. “Damn good shooting if it was intentional.

  Back of the head. Twilight. Moving target.”

  I added the shredded chicken to the rich gravy I had heated in one of Mother’s old black iron skillets while Dwight told me that J.D.’s sister said that he was a roofer with one of the local contractors and th
at they usually knocked off about the same time every evening so someone who knew his habits could have been lying in wait.

  “It’s almost like last month, isn’t it?” I said, recalling the death of a colleague shortly before our wedding.

  “Only this time, the shooter wasn’t driving alongside, talking through their open windows. Not on that two-lane road.”

  Dwight frowned. “Actually, his window was open, too.

  Not all the way.” He measured four or five inches with his hands to illustrate.

  “Did your witness see another vehicle?”

  Friends or neighbors who meet on backcountry roads often stop and talk until the appearance of another car or pickup makes them move on.

  Dwight shook his head. “Anyhow, it was his right window that was open,” he said, following my line of thought.

  “Was he a smoker?”

  “Yeah. Cigarettes in his shirt pocket. Stubs in the ashtray. Burn marks on the seat.”

  “There you go, then.” Except that even as I said it, I thought back to my own brief fling with cigarettes. It was always my left window that I kept cracked so I could flick the ashes out and blow the smoke away, not the right one.

  I started smoking about the time I got my driver’s license. It seemed to go with my sporty little white T-Bird.

  I quit, cold turkey, two years later when Mother was dying from lung cancer. It was part of my attempt to bargain with God: Please let her live and I’ll never light another cigarette, never drive over fifty-five, never get in thebackseat with another boy, never skip church again, please?

  Giving up cigarettes was the only part of the vow that I stuck with.

  But then God didn’t keep His side of the bargain either.

  The toaster dinged and the fragrance of nicely browned bread mingled with the aroma of bubbling chicken gravy.

  But thinking of bargains and litter reminded me. “If it warms up some, Minnie and Doris want us all out Saturday morning to clean up our own stretch of road. It’s getting pretty messy.”

  “I’d love to help y’all,” Dwight said with a grin, “but Rouse’s killing will probably eat up most of my free time unless we clear it fast.”