Death's Half Acre dk-14

by Margaret Maron

  But when you slap a closely built, hundred-house development down in the middle of farming country, neither side completely understands the other.

  Today’s case in point: trespass and malicious damage to real property.

  Three twelve-and thirteen-year-old boys had been arrested after roaring over a farmer’s field of young soybean plants on four-wheel ATVs, chasing one another in circles. They had torn up so many plants that the whole six acres would have to be disked under and replanted.

  The farm was posted with NO TRESPASSING signs and yes, the kids could read and yes, it was thoughtless of them to do that much damage. No farm kid would have dreamed of wrecking a crop—anybody’s crop—but these boys were from a nearby development and neither the kids nor their parents seemed to have a smidgen of knowledge of farming.

  Several Christmases ago, I chipped in for a couple of ATVs for the nieces and nephews out on the farm. They’ve mostly graduated to cars, and the four-wheelers stay parked at our house these days for Cal and Mary Pat to use; but even at eight, they know to stick to the lanes or they’ll lose their ticket to ride.

  After lecturing the kids about respect for private property, I turned to their parents.

  “Your houses sit on quarter-acre lots,” I said. “When you bought your sons these four-wheelers, where did you think they were going to ride them? It’s illegal for them to be on the road and you don’t have any land. What were you thinking?”

  All I got were indifferent shrugs.

  “I see by their records that this is the second time these three boys have been cited, which means that you had notice of their prior misuse of the ATVs.”

  Again, looks of indifference.

  “In other words, Mom and Dad, your failure to supervise is negligence and makes you liable for all the damages and leaves you open to the possibility of being prosecuted for contributing to their delinquency.”

  Now I had their attention.

  I leafed through their case folders and read over Luther Parker’s notes. It took me a few minutes to process what he’d planned to do and when I next glanced up, two of the parents appeared distinctly worried.

  “Last time, your sons got a very light slap on the wrist and there was no inconvenience to you. This time, I’m ordering that they be sent for a mental health evaluation, for which you will be billed.”

  I glanced over at the farmer whose beans had been destroyed. “Mr. Bell estimates the damage at fifteen hundred dollars, which is extremely reasonable, if not downright generous of him.”

  I then put the boys under the supervision of a juvenile court counselor, and ordered them to pay damages, to stay off Mr. Bell’s property, and not to ride their ATVs anywhere that wasn’t legally sanctioned.

  Some of the parents were huffing by this time, but I warned them that if their sons came back to court again for misuse of their ATVs, they themselves would also face charges. “And penalties in adult courts are a lot tougher than here.”

  “Don’t worry, Your Honor,” said one of the mothers. “His four-wheeling days are over. There’s going to be a FOR SALE sign on it this afternoon.”

  “Aw, Mo-om!” the twelve-year-old whined.

  “You heard her,” his father said sternly. “And your part of that fifteen hundred is coming out of your savings account, not ours.”

  Juvenile court can be a real downer at times and that afternoon, I dealt with a bully who’s well on his way to spending his life in prison if someone doesn’t shoot him first. I signed an order that would return a rebellious fourteen-year-old runaway to her family in Virginia, sent three repeat teenagers to a minimum security youth center, and arranged protective custody for two little girls whose foster dad was waiting trial for raping them.

  At least I hoped I was giving them protection.

  When Luther signed the papers that put those girls in that last foster home, he must surely have thought they would be safer there than where they were. I suppose you could say he was right if you call being raped safer than being beaten to a bloody pulp by their birth father, who’s now serving life for killing their baby brother.

  By the end of the session, I was totally drained. As I sat down at the defense table to read over a search warrant a Dobbs police officer wanted me to sign, a pair of familiar hands began to massage the muscles that had knotted in my neck. For once, the search warrant was properly filled out and I signed it without a murmur.

  When we were alone in the courtroom, I looked up into Dwight’s warm brown eyes. “Ummm. If I were a cat, I’d be purring about now.”

  “Rough day?” he asked as he kneaded the tension from my neck.

  “Just this last half. How come you’re still here? Where’s Cal?”

  “Kate called me. He’s over at the farm with Jake and Mary Pat, helping to set out those tuberoses the kids are gonna grow.”

  Seth, Daddy, and I had given some of my nieces and nephews a twenty-acre field to try to grow an economically feasible organic crop. They planned to put five acres in tuberoses and sunflowers, and the rest in soybeans.

  I glanced at my watch. Almost five-thirty. “Will someone give them supper?”

  “Supper and a sleepover at Seth and Minnie’s. Tomorrow’s a teacher work day, so the kids’re gonna pick up a couple of pizzas and watch one of Jess’s favorite horse movies.”

  His eyes twinkled and a bolt of happy anticipation shot through me. I do love Dwight’s son, but hey! Dwight and I have been married only four months.

  “You mean we have the whole evening to ourselves?”

  “Want to drive into Raleigh? Drinks at Miss Molly’s, then dinner or a movie?”

  I shook my head. “Nope. I want to pick up something on our way home, then make popcorn and watch an old video the way we used to before I knew you loved me.”

  His smile turned into a mock leer. “Exactly the way we used to?”

  I leered right back at him, remembering how chaste those evenings had been. “Only this time you can show me what was actually on your mind back then.”

  CHAPTER 9

  . . . and if there is

  a fly nearby, or dust, a blowing curtain,

  the sun coming in through the glass, watch it:

  that is yours to keep.

  —Fiddledeedee, by Shelby Stephenson

  FRIDAY MORNING

  Walking down the hallway to his office next morning, Dwight eventually realized that all the smiles he was getting probably meant that he had a sappy one pasted on his face.

  “Good morning, sir,” one of the deputies said as he passed the squad room.

  If he only knew, Dwight thought to himself, savoring the memory of Deborah when he had taken her a cup of coffee an hour or so earlier. No sooner had he handed her the mug than she had carefully placed it on the shelf of their headboard, then pulled him down next to her for a repeat of last night when she had disappeared into their bedroom, ostensibly to pick out a video.

  “Need some help deciding which one?” he had called when she didn’t return right away.

  “That’s okay. I’ve got it.” A few minutes later, she appeared in the doorway. “Men in Black, or me in this?” she asked with a perfectly straight face.

  As he felt himself begin to harden, he had laughed and said, “No contest. Men in Black, of course.”

  “You’re in a good mood this morning,” Bo Poole said. “You and Wilson come up with specifics on Candace Bradshaw yesterday?”

  “Nothing worth talking about,” he said. “If she wrote anything down, we haven’t found it yet. Her assistant claims she kept her board membership pretty much separate from Bradshaw Management and says if she took money for her favors, she would’ve considered it more like a perfectly legitimate thank-you gift than a kickback. Richards came up empty on her home computer, too. The Ginsburg twins are going file by file on both computers just to see if she got cute and hid something under an innocuous label, and I’ve asked Danny Creedmore to come in this morning, but I don’t expect to get mu
ch out of him until we have something to pry him open with.”

  They were still talking when Dwight’s phone rang and a doctor in the medical examiner’s office over in Chapel Hill handed him a crowbar. Because Candace Bradshaw’s death had been tagged a probable suicide, there had been no huge rush to do the postmortem.

  “Good thing that whoever found her tore that bag open without disturbing the drawstrings,” the doctor told him. “Soon as I cut the bag away from her neck, it was clear that it didn’t line up with the original marks on her neck. She didn’t die from asphyxia, Bryant. She was strangled first with a thin ligament and then the bag put on.”

  “Yeah? Wait a minute while I let Sheriff Poole know.” He pressed the speaker button on the phone base so that Bo could hear. “They’re calling it a homicide, Bo.”

  “You sure about that, Doc?” asked Bo. “She didn’t do it herself?”

  “Excuse me?” The doctor sounded offended. “I won’t have the full report for another day or two, but I can tell you now that the force was such that one of the rings in her trachea was broken. There’s no way she could have garroted herself from behind and then tied on that bag.”

  “What about scratch marks on her neck? Or fingernail scrapings?”

  “Sorry. Nothing like that. If she fought her attacker, it’s not evident and her wrists don’t seem to have been tied, although there’s some faint bruising on both arms that could indicate she struggled to get out of some sort of soft restraint—maybe a blanket or a sheet?—and there was a fresh bruise on her right knee for whatever that’s worth.”

  “What about a TOD?” Dwight asked.

  “Find somebody who can say when she ate a spinach salad with hard-boiled eggs,” the doctor said crisply. “She died about two and a half hours after eating it. Lacking that and only judging by the rigor, time of death could be anywhere from mid-afternoon to midnight.”

  “Thanks, Doc,” said Bo and leaned over to switch off the speakerphone. “I better go let Doug Woodall know.”

  “I’ll call Terry,” said Dwight. “And I’ll get some people to nail down when she ate that salad.”

  “Don’t forget you’ve got Creedmore coming in.”

  “I haven’t. You want to sit in on it?”

  “I might should,” said Bo. “I always feel better myself when I have a witness to any conversations with ol’ Danny.”

  Barefooted, Daniel Creedmore probably stood five-seven, the same as Bo Poole. His tooled leather cowboy boots added an extra inch, though, and his waistline looked to be about four inches bigger. On this mild spring day, he wore a black poplin windbreaker and a maroon shirt that was unbuttoned at the top and tucked inside charcoal-gray slacks. Like Bo, he was mid-fifties and had a friendly open face, shrewd blue eyes, and thinning brown hair. Unlike Bo, he was not someone who immediately commanded attention and he did not possess Bo’s innate easygoing nature, despite telling everyone to call him Danny. It was as if his mama had told him he could catch more flies with honey and he had spent his adult life trying to hide the astringent vinegar that lay just beneath a surface of assumed warmth and friendliness.

  “Good to see you, Bo,” he said as he entered Bo’s office and took a chair across from him. “Hey, Bryant. How’s it going?”

  “Thanks for coming in,” the sheriff said, “and let me offer my condolences on Candace Bradshaw’s death.”

  “Thanks,” Creedmore said blandly, pretending to misunderstand. “The county and the party both have suffered a great loss. We were hoping to put her up for a state office this next cycle.”

  “Like you did last time?” asked Dwight.

  “That’s right,” Bo said, leaning back in his big padded chair. His blue eyes twinkled. “I did hear that Woody Galloway’s throwing his hat in the governor’s ring.”

  Woodrow Galloway was a state senator who would have a tough primary fight for the party’s nomination. Unfortunately, his seat in the General Assembly was up for election this time, too. Two years ago, one of the representatives from the county was in the same position. That’s when it was decided to get Candace Bradshaw to file for his seat. After he lost the nomination he had sought, Candace gallantly withdrew her name in his favor, which was how she became chair of the board.

  It was an open secret that they hoped to do the same with Galloway’s slot—that Candace would keep his chair warm in case he lost the primary, which most assumed he would.

  Creedmore shrugged. “Would’ve been a little harder this time around. Candace didn’t have much name recognition outside the county, but with enough backing, we thought she was up to it.”

  “As you say, a real loss,” said Dwight.

  “On a personal level as well, right?” Bo added.

  Danny Creedmore’s eyes narrowed. “You want to explain that, Sheriff?”

  “I think you know where this is headed,” the sheriff said mildly. “Her name’s been linked to yours ever since you and your friends first ran her for the board. It seems to be fairly common knowledge and I suppose we could document times and places if you make us.”

  They locked eyes for a long moment, then Creedmore caved with a rueful laugh and a hands-up what-the-hell gesture of locker-room camaraderie. “Shit, Bo, she was a good-looking woman and who doesn’t like a little strange nookie on the side when you’ve been married long as I have?”

  Bo gave an encouraging grin and Creedmore obliged with colorful details on just what a hot little number Candy Bradshaw could be. No man ever knows another man completely, thought Dwight, but he’d be willing to bet everything he owned that Bo had never been with another woman while Marnie was alive.

  “Why’d she kill herself?” Bo asked as the other man wound down.

  “Now that I couldn’t tell you. Surprised the hell out of me. It was like getting a sucker punch in the gut when they told it yesterday. I hear she left a letter? Don’t suppose you can tell me what was in it?”

  “Sorry. Any truth to it?”

  Creedmore thrust his hands in the pocket of his black jacket and stretched back in his chair with a smile and a shake of his head. “Good try, Bo.”

  “When did you last see her?” Dwight asked.

  “It’d been at least a week. To be honest with you, it was sorta cooling off between us. Sexually, I mean. I think she was seeing somebody else and—”

  “Who?” said Bo.

  “Could be almost anybody, I suppose. Thad Hamilton. One of our representatives. Hell, maybe even Woody Galloway himself.”

  Dwight frowned. “But you yourself had no contact with her the week before she died?”

  “Didn’t say that, Bryant. I said I hadn’t seen her. We talked almost every day. There was a public hearing on the planning board’s recommendations Tuesday night and she was opposed to them. Wanted to game it with me.”

  I’ll just bet she did, thought Dwight. He glanced inquiringly at Bo and got an almost imperceptible nod. “Who wanted her dead, Creedmore?”

  “Huh?” No one ever said that Creedmore made his fortune through dumb luck alone. “You telling me she was killed? She didn’t do it herself?”

  “We’d appreciate it if you’d keep that under your hat for a few hours,” Bo said. “But yeah. Someone strangled her.”

  “Well, damn!” said Danny Creedmore. They could see the wheels turning behind those shrewd blue eyes. “You talk to her good-for-nothing daughter yet?”

  “What do you mean I can’t move back in here?” Dee asked indignantly.

  She had appeared at the door of Candace Bradshaw’s new house with her duffle bag, and Special Agent Sabrina Ginsburg and Deputy Mayleen Richards had immediately blocked her entrance.

  “This is my mother’s house. I live here and I’m her only child so I probably own it now.” She glared at the two law officers and all but stamped her foot in indignation.

  “Unless she left a will, I rather doubt that,” said the blond Ginsburg “twin.” “It’s our understanding that she and your dad were still legally marrie
d, so he would be one of her heirs if she died intestate.”

  “Whatever. So call him. I’m sure he’d rather I stay here than keep sleeping on his couch, and besides, I need fresh clothes.”

  “You really can’t move back in,” Richards told her, thinking that Deanna Bradshaw was acting more like twelve than twenty-two. “You can pick up some of your clothes, but you can’t stay till we finish our investigation.”

  While Sabrina Ginsburg went back to checking the files on Candace Bradshaw’s laptop, Mayleen Richards followed the daughter into her messy bedroom next door to the office.

  The girl stopped at the doorway and gave a look of distaste at the state of her room. “Oh crap! I guess you’re not letting Sancha in to clean either.”

  “That’s right,” Richards said. “While you’re here, though, I need to ask you some questions. You may have been the last one to see your mother alive. Did she give any indication that—”

  “—that she was going to put a bag over her head and end it all? No! Okay, we had a fight. She was still pissed that I let a guy stay over last week and we got into it again.”

  “What guy?”

  “Doesn’t matter. I’ve dumped him. He can’t hold his liquor. Puked all over her new couch.”

  “I need his name.”

  Rolling her eyes, Dee muttered the boyfriend’s full name and that of his dorm over at Chapel Hill.

  “Thanks,” Richards said, writing it on the yellow legal pad she carried. “Was your mother depressed? In some kind of trouble?”

  “My dad told me what she wrote.” Dee upended her duffle bag on the bed and began to pull clean lingerie from an open drawer. “But he didn’t believe it and I don’t either. Mom liked her life. She was kicking ass and having fun.”

  “Whose ass, Dee?”

  “Anybody’s who needed it, I guess. How should I know? I was at school till Easter most of the time.”

  “That when she moved in here?”