Rituals of the Season Page 21

  MONDAY MORNING, DECEMBER 20

  While Percy Denning worked inside the SUV, Dwight questioned the man, a Mr. Harper, himself.

  “Do you remember what time it was on Friday?”

  “Probably between four-fifteen and a quarter to five? Late afternoon, but not dark yet. I wasn’t paying attention to the time and I didn’t have the radio on. I was thinking about my mother. Remembering how hard she and my dad worked to get us all through school. The kind of thing you think about at a time like that. Your mother still young and healthy?”

  Dwight nodded.

  “Then you don’t know yet how it feels to think you might lose her.”

  “Is she okay now?”

  “Thanks be to God. They put in a pacemaker and she’s doing fine, all praise to His name.”

  With his assistant’s camera documenting every stage of the search, it took Percy Denning less than fifteen minutes to find where the slug had ricocheted off a metal seat-belt buckle and buried itself in the upholstered rear seat.

  “Weird,” he said, holding the little clear plastic evidence bag up to the sunlight, “but it sure does look like another .44. Let me go run it under my microscope.”

  “We’ll be in my office,” said Dwight. “If you’ll step this way, Mr. Harper?”

  “This isn’t going to take too long, is it? My wife wanted to go Christmas shopping this afternoon.”

  “We just need to get your address and phone number and have your statement typed up,” Dwight assured him.

  “Give me a keyboard and I’ll type it myself,” said the man. “I’m an insurance adjuster and I spend half my life typing up reports.”

  Twenty minutes later, Denning walked into Dwight’s office.

  “It’s a match, Major. And there’s a tiny, tiny fleck of dried blood. I don’t know if it’s enough for a DNA match, but I’ll send it in.” He hesitated.

  “Something else, Denning?”

  “I didn’t say anything Friday because it didn’t seem important, but Whitley’s liquor bottle . . .”

  “What about it?”

  “It might not mean a thing, but his were the only prints on the bottle.”

  “So?”

  “The only prints, Major.”

  “Oh,” said Dwight in dawning comprehension. “No smears, no blurs?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I see. And Whitley’s prints?”

  “One perfect set. It’s like he picked up this pristine bottle one time and never changed the position of his fingers.”

  “So somebody got cute.”

  “Not cute enough. That little strip of plastic off the cap that we found under the seat? There’s a partial thumbprint and it’s not Whitley’s. I don’t know if there’s enough to get a hit, but I’ll run it through AFIS.”

  After Denning left, Dwight placed a call to Chapel Hill. As he hung up, Bo Poole came back from lunch and did an exaggerated double take upon seeing him behind the desk. “I thought I told you not to come back till you were married.”

  “Sorry, Bo, but we’ve got a little problem.”

  “Let me get this straight,” said the sheriff when Dwight finished explaining. “A bullet that was fired the same night Tracy Johnson died, a bullet that may have killed her if that’s her fleck of blood, wound up in a car headed to Georgia?”

  “That’s right.”

  “It’s from the same gun Don Whitley used to shoot himself Sunday night?”

  “That’s what Denning says.”

  “And the slug Silas Lee found on Wednesday morning? It’s from the same damn gun?”

  “Denning says it wasn’t even messed up much, so it was easy to match it up.”

  “Real convenient, won’t it?” said Bo. The faster his mind worked, the slower his folksy drawl. “Wanted to make sure we’d tie the gun to both deaths, didn’ he?”

  Dwight nodded. “We’ve talked about how Tracy was backtracking on the Martha Hurst case and we all know that Silas Lee was in charge of that investigation. Tracy gets shot and when the metal detectors don’t turn up the slug right away, guess who just happens to finds it?”

  “A little extra insurance,” said Bo. “Slick.”

  “Not really,” Dwight said and told him about the extremely clean bourbon bottle. “No prints from the ABC clerk that sold it to him and bagged it up. None of Whitley’s prints when he took it out of the bag or put it in his car or picked it up more than once when he was working up the nerve to shoot himself. I just talked to the ME who did his autopsy. They found a huge amount of sleeping pills in his bloodstream.”

  “In the bourbon?”

  “Maybe. Denning’s going to check it.”

  “How you want to handle it?” asked Bo when they had discussed all the probabilities.

  “First I need to make one more phone call and then I thought I’d get the whole search team in here, see if any of them saw him plant the slug.”

  Eddie Lloyd and Mike Castleman were out on the interstate, Silas Lee was in court upstairs, and both uniforms were on patrol. It took a good hour to call them all back in, and Dwight used that hour to put some pressure on Daniel Ruiz’s attorney, who blustered and squirmed and talked about client confidentiality and eventually told him what he needed to know.

  “Let’s go into the conference room,” said Dwight when Mayleen Richards came to tell him they were all there. “Leave your guns out here.”

  That startled them into uneasiness. Except for Denning, they were unaware of why they’d been summoned for this meeting, and they looked at one anther in puzzlement, but did as ordered, then filed into the conference room and took chairs around the table.

  Richards remained standing by the open door with her own weapon visible.

  Dwight quickly laid it out for them, beginning with the discovery of a third matching bullet less than two hours earlier. “Except that it appears to be the first one, the one that killed Tracy Johnson and caused the car crash that then killed her little girl. The third slug is what killed Don Whitley. The second one is the one that you found in the road bank, Jones.”

  “Yeah,” said Sheriff Poole. “Want to tell us again exactly how that happened, Detective Jones?” His tone made a sarcasm out of Silas Lee’s title.

  Jones might not have been the sharpest detective on the squad, but he was not a complete idiot either. “Hey, you saying I planted it? That I killed Whitley? That’s crazy! I wasn’t even the one that laid off that part of the grid.”

  “Who was?” asked Dwight.

  “It was Castleman. And he kept bugging me to go slower, be more careful.”

  All eyes turned to Mike Castleman.

  The deputy brushed back a black curl from his forehead and gave a deprecating smile. “Hey, now, guys. Wait just a damn minute here. Yeah, I may have gridded off where the trajectory could have gone, but Denning and Lloyd were the ones who figured out the perimeters.”

  “But we didn’t work that part of the bank at all,” Denning said quietly. “Only you and Jones here.”

  Silas Lee Jones was still working it out on his fingers. “One of us killed Ms. Johnson and then shot Whitley, too? Why?”

  “Yeah, why?” asked Eddie Lloyd, leaning in on Castleman, his wiry body as tight as a coiled spring.

  “Not you, too, Eddie? Why would I shoot him?” said Castleman. “We were partners, friends.”

  “And it’s because you were friends that you could get him to meet you at Ryder Creek after you read that e-mail he sent you Sunday night,” Dwight said inexorably. “That wasn’t a suicide note. That was a heads-up from a colleague who was going to turn you in. What’d you do? Tell him you could show him proof that it was Lloyd who was dirty and that he was the one shot Tracy?”

  Castleman’s handsome face had gone pasty.

  “You were in court with her that morning. Something she said about Ruiz must have tipped you off that there was a deal in the works and what it was. You heard her say she was driving back early, so you waited out there on the
interstate for her, shot her, and then pretended you were on a regular patrol. Immediately after the crash, her cell phone was seen in its holder, yet by the time Denning got there, it had disappeared. It and her Palm Pilot, too. And you were first officer on the scene.”

  “You were skimming the take?” Eddie Lloyd exclaimed.

  Dwight nodded. “I talked to Ruiz’s defense attorney. We thought it was Whitley he was going to finger. It wasn’t. It was you, Castleman.”

  “No!” Mike Castleman stood up so abruptly that Richards’s hand went for her gun as his chair crashed to the floor behind him.

  “I’m a father.” He looked at them beseechingly. “I have a daughter. I wouldn’t have killed a little girl. I wouldn’t. I couldn’t.”

  “Maybe not if you’d known she was in the car,” Dwight said. “That’s what you said at Jerry’s Sunday night. You didn’t notice the car seat. You were concentrating on the driver.”

  “Michael Castleman,” said Bo Poole, “you’re under arrest for the murders of Tracy Johnson, Mei Johnson, and Donald Whitley.”

  As they slipped the handcuffs on, Dwight motioned to Richards. “You and Jamison. Get a search warrant and turn his place inside out. Look for her cell phone and Palm Pilot and find out what he did with the money.”

  “We’ll look,” said Richards, “but I bet he was using it to pay his daughter’s tuition. And he said he was getting her a new car for Christmas.”

  Dwight reached for his phone and dialed Deborah’s number. When she answered, he said, “Ready to go home?”

  “I’m at the hospital,” she told him.

  “Huh?”

  “It’s okay. Nobody’s hurt, but see if you can find Kayra and Nolan and tell them to meet us in your office. His mother was right. Martha Hurst didn’t kill her stepson.”

  “What’s the matter?” asked Bo, who’d been watching his face. “She’s not leaving you at the altar, is she?”

  CHAPTER 25

  A lady who has children, or one accustomed to perform for herself light household duties, will soon find the advantage of wearing materials that will wash.

  Florence Hartley, The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette, 1873

  Told by an impatient Mary Pat that he needed to choose between dinosaurs and footballs now!, Cal picked a dark blue set printed in stars and planets, only to learn that kid prints didn’t come queen size. Happily, almost as soon as we got to the larger sizes, he spotted white wolves howling to a midnight Arctic sky. “Look at the paw prints on the sheets,” he told Jake and Mary Pat.

  We bought sheets, pillowcases, and comforter and a couple of goose-down pillows for Cal, and as we passed a machine on the way out of the store, I gave them quarters for jawbreaker bubble gum.

  After linens came toys. We crossed the half-mile-long parking lot to the other side of the outlet mall and descended upon Mertz’s, one of those big-box chain stores that sell everything from shoes and clothes to upholstered furniture and garden supplies. The kids looked at bicycles and skateboards and I made mental notes of the things that seemed to interest Cal so that I could tell Dwight.

  When she turns twenty-five, Mary Pat is due to inherit an enormous trust fund, but for now, she was anxiously worried that her allowance wouldn’t stretch to cover a stuffed dog she wanted to get for Kate’s new baby next month.

  “Everybody have all your Christmas presents wrapped and hidden?” I asked.

  “I don’t,” said Cal. “I don’t know what to get you and Dad.”

  “Me? I’m easy. Anything chocolate works for me. When I was a little girl, Santa Claus always brought me a box of chocolate-covered cherries. The dark ones. Not milk chocolate. It hasn’t felt like a real Christmas since I grew up because nobody ever gives them to me anymore and I can’t buy them for myself.”

  “You can’t?” They were intrigued by the notion of forbidden sweets.

  “Well, I could, I suppose, but that would be like cheating. No, I guess I’ll have to spend the rest of my Christmases without them. Besides, they probably don’t even make the bittersweet kind these days.” I gave a dramatic sigh as Mary Pat and Cal exchanged significant glances. “But for your dad? He’s really hard. Let me think.”

  “Not clothes.”

  “Not clothes,” I agreed, thinking of the beautiful brown sweater I’d bought Dwight when I held court up in the mountains in October. Normally I wait till the last minute to go Christmas shopping. I love the crowds, the decorated stores, the sales. This year, though, as soon as I knew what our Christmas was going to entail, I’d begun picking up gifts. Now they were squirreled away in my garage like a stash of acorns against a winter storm. “So how much were you thinking to spend?”

  “Well, I have twenty-seven dollars and eighty-nine cents, but I still need to get something for Grandma.” Cal looked up at me in hopeful earnestness and I wanted so badly to hug him. He was going to be built like Dwight and he had Dwight’s brown eyes, with a light sprinkle of Rob and Beth’s freckles across his little nose.

  “I know! How about something for his beer-making? When he was moving the other night, somebody stepped on his measuring scale, so he certainly does need another one and there’s a kitchen supply store just two doors down from here.”

  Soon we were discussing the merits of the different scales for weighing quarter-ounces of hops or flavorings and settled on one that had a small removable aluminum pan.

  Best of all, it cost less than fifteen dollars.

  By now it was lunchtime, as Jake had reminded us ever since we left the toy department at Mertz’s, so it was back over to the food court over beside the linen store for egg rolls all around and a communal carton of shrimp fried rice. The place featured stainless steel tables and chairs and was jammed with Christmas shoppers. At the next table, two young women were showing each other their finds while their toddlers played around their feet.

  “I’ve been wanting linen napkins forever,” I heard one of them say. “And these were such a good buy, I decided the hell with it.”

  “Good for you. You know, I’ve never regretted the things I’ve bought for myself,” the other one said solemnly. “Only the things I didn’t buy.”

  At that moment, the first woman’s little girl tripped and fell and split her lip on the edge of the stroller.

  Blood streamed from the cut. The mother instantly scooped up the wailing child and started to dip one of her new napkins into her cup of ice water. At the last second, though, she pushed the cloth napkins aside, grabbed one of the used paper ones littering the table, and held it to the child’s mouth while she darted to the counter for more. The other woman brought another handful back to the table and they applied ice and cold wet napkins until the bleeding stopped, all the time worrying aloud whether or not the child would need stitches. The young mother was almost in tears herself. By the time they’d decided it should be looked at, I had heard enough to realize they were sisters, wayfarers off the interstate, who hadn’t a clue as to where the nearest emergency room was.

  “Excuse me,” I said, “but if you’re wanting a hospital, you’re only about two minutes away.”

  “Oh, thank you,” they said, gathering up their belongings.

  I gave them directions and they hurried out.

  “I hate stitches,” Cal said darkly and the other two nodded in total agreement.

  As they compared their various scars and told one another horror stories about hospital emergency rooms, I started thinking about the implications of what I’d just seen. That was a distraught protective mother, no question of her maternal concern, yet she had unconsciously rejected the option of using one of her new linen napkins to stop the blood, had even wasted a precious extra second or two to go fetch paper ones.

  I remembered Herman bitching at us the other day for using his good screwdriver to open a paint can.

  So why, given her choice of three softball bats, would Martha Hurst have smashed her stepson/ex-lover with her good game bat?

  Maybe Nolan’s mothe
r was right after all. Maybe she really hadn’t.

  But Roy Hurst had died in her trailer on the only day Martha could have killed him.

  Or did he?

  I thought about all the literature I’d read on forensic entomology and the graphic discussion Kayra and Nolan and I had about blowfly larvae at the Taos Tacos. No way would the ME have made a mistake about counting the stages.

  Unless—? What was it that old woman at the trailer park had told them?

  Kayra and Nolan had struck out with Deenie Gates, but I was a judge. And what’s the good of having the office if you can’t take advantage of it once in a while?

  “Come on,” I told the children. “Let’s go visit Miss Amy.”

  “Who’s Miss Amy?” they asked.

  “My brother Will’s wife.”

  “You have an awful lot of brothers, don’t you?” asked Cal.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “There won’t be a test till next Christmas.”

  I called ahead and gave Amy a sketchy idea of what I wanted without going into too much detail—too many little big-eared pitchers in the car with me—and when we got to the hospital, she pointed me to a meeting room off the lobby where Deenie Gates was waiting and whisked the three kids off to check out the games in the children’s lounge on the third floor.

  I had expected the same sullen reaction that Kayra and Nolan said they’d received from the woman and had thought I might have to trick her into talking. Instead, I got a shy smile of genuine warmth when I sat down at the table across from her. Now that I saw her again, I began to remember. Lank blond hair, the muddy skin tones of a recovering alcoholic, and eyes that kept glancing away, unable to maintain steady contact. She was still prematurely stoop-shouldered as if expecting a blow, but there were no visible bruises today.

  “How’s it going, Ms. Gates?”

  “Going good, Judge Knott. Real good,” she said. “I been doing what you told me to—making up my own mind, not waiting for some man to make it up for me. You were right. I won’t really getting nothing from none of ’em ’cepting their fists and more stuff on my charge cards. I’m the one going out to work every day while they lay around and watch the sports channel and drink my beer. I’m the one putting food on the table. How come I need to take their shit? That talking-to you give me was the best thing ever happened to me. I mean, I know some of the others tried to tell me, but something about seeing you were there in that black robe? I only come up before men judges before and you talked to me like you knew I could do it.”