Hard Row

by Margaret Maron

  “Hey, his truck bumped me first, Judge.”

  “Sorry, Your Honor,” said his attorney.

  “You’ll get a chance to tell your story, Mr. King,” I said, “but for our records, are you pleading guilty or not guilty?”

  “Not guilty, ma’am.”

  It was going to be one of those days.

  CHAPTER 2

  It should be borne in mind that “home” is not merely a place of shelter from the storms and cold of winter and the heat of summer—a place in which to sleep securely at night and labor by day. It is a place where the children receive their first and most lasting impressions, those that go far in molding and forming the character of the man and woman in after life.

  —Profitable Farming in the Southern States, 1890

  The year had turned and days were supposed to be getting longer. Nevertheless, it was full dark before I got home.

  When things are normal, Dwight’s work day begins an hour earlier than mine and ends an hour sooner, which means he often starts supper. I half expected to see him at the stove and to smell food. Instead, the kitchen was empty and the stove bare of any pots or pans as I let myself in through the garage door. The television was on mute in the living room though and Cal looked up from some school papers spread across the coffee table. A brown-eyed towhead, he’s tall for his age and as awkward as a young colt. In his haste to neaten up, several sheets of papers slid to the floor. His dog Bandit, a smooth-haired terrier with a brown eye mask, sidestepped the papers and trotted over to greet me.

  Cal wore a red sweatshirt emblazoned with a big white 12 and he gave me a guilty smile as he gathered up his third-grade homework and tried to make a single tidy pile. A Friday night, he was already on his homework, yet he was worried about messing up the living room?

  I’m no neat freak and a little clutter doesn’t bother me. Dwight either. But Cal was still walking on eggs with us, almost as if he was afraid that if he stepped an inch out of line, someone would yell at him.

  Neither Dwight nor I are much for yelling, but when you’re eight years old and your whole world turns upside down overnight, I guess it makes you cautious.

  Six months ago he was living with his mother up in Virginia and I had been footloose and fancy free. I lived alone and came and went as I chose, accountable to no one except the state of North Carolina, which did expect me to show up in court on a regular basis. Then in blurred succession came an October engagement, followed by a Christmas wedding, followed by the murder of Dwight’s first wife before the ink was completely dry on our marriage certificate. Now my no-strings life suddenly included two guys and a dog with their own individual needs and obligations.

  As soon as I saw Cal’s shirt though, I remembered why I was on my own for supper tonight, and a quick glance at the calendar hanging on the refrigerator confirmed it. Pencilled there in today’s square was HURRICANES—7 PM.

  Dwight came down the hall from our bedroom, zipping his heavy jacket and carrying Cal’s hockey stick under his arm.

  “Oh, hey!” A smile warmed his brown eyes. “I was afraid we’d have to leave before you got home. You ’bout ready, buddy?”

  Cal nodded. “Just have to get my jacket and a Sharpie. I’m gonna try to get Rod Brind’Amour’s autograph tonight.”

  As he picked up his books and scurried off to his room, Dwight hooked me with the hockey stick and drew me close. I’ve kissed my share of men in my time, but his slow kisses are blue-ribbon-best-in-show. “Wish you were coming with us,” he said, nuzzling my neck.

  “No, you don’t,” I assured him. “I promised to honor and love. There was nothing in the vows about hockey.”

  “You sure you read the fine print?”

  “That’s the first thing an attorney does read, my friend.”

  I adore ACC basketball, I pull for the Atlanta Braves, and I can follow a football game without asking too many dumb questions, but ice hockey leaves me cold in more ways than one. When you grow up in the south on a dirt road, you don’t even learn to roller skate. Yes, we have ponds and yes, they do occasionally freeze over, but the ice is seldom thick enough to trust and the closest I ever got to live ice-skating was once when the Ice Capades came to Raleigh and Mother and Aunt Zell took me and some of the younger boys to see them. We all agreed the circus was a better show. My preadolescent brothers preferred hot trapeze artists to cool ice goddesses and I kept waiting for the elephants.

  But Cal had played street hockey on skates up in Shaysville and had become hooked on the Canes when he spent Christmas with us and watched four televised games.

  Four.

  In one week.

  He and Dwight didn’t miss a single one. I’d wanted to bond (not to mention snuggle in next to my new husband), so I joined them on the extra-long leather couch Dwight had brought over from his bachelor apartment. I honestly tried to follow along, but the terminology was indecipherable and I never knew where the puck was nor why someone had been sent to the penalty box or why they would abruptly stop play for no discernible reason to have a jump ball.

  That made Cal laugh. “Not jump ball,” he had told me kindly. “It’s a face-off.”

  Two grown men fighting for possession of a small round object, right? Same thing in my book.

  But now that Cal was living with us permanently, it had become their thing. I went off and puttered happily by myself when they were watching a game, and I had scored a couple of decent seats for the last half of the season with the help of Karen Prince, a former client who now worked in the Hurricanes ticket office.

  “The drive back and forth to Raleigh will give you and Cal a chance to be alone together and talk. Kids open up in a car,” I told Dwight when he questioned why I hadn’t badgered Karen for three seats.

  I really did think they needed the time and space to help Cal cope with all the changes in his young life, but it wasn’t unadulterated altruism. Put myself where I couldn’t read a book or catch up on paperwork? Get real.

  Dwight laughed and gave me another quick kiss as Cal came back ready to go.

  “Have fun,” I said and when the door had closed behind them, I happily contemplated the evening’s sybaritic possibilities.

  “So what do you think, Bandit?” I asked the dog. “Popcorn and a chick flick video, or a long soak in the tub followed by a manicure?”

  Or I could bake a cake to take for Sunday dinner at Minnie and Seth’s house. Seth is five brothers up from me, the one I’ve always felt closest to, and his wife has acted as my political advisor from the day I first decided to run for a seat on the district court bench.

  I unzipped my high heel boots and had just kicked one off when the door opened again. Dwight had the phone pressed to his ear and there was a glum look on Cal’s face.

  “Tell Denning and Richards I’ll meet them there in ten minutes.” Dwight flipped the phone shut. “Sorry, Cal, but I have to go. It’s my job.”

  He headed for our bedroom where he keeps his handgun locked up when he’s off duty and I followed.

  “What’s happened?” I asked as he holstered the gun on his belt.

  “They’ve found two legs in a ditch near Bethel Baptist,” he said grimly.

  Bethel Baptist Church is on a back road about halfway between our house and Dobbs, Colleton’s county seat. My mind fought with the grisly image of severed limbs. “Human legs?”

  “White male’s all I know for now.”

  And it was clear that he didn’t want to say any more. Not with Cal standing disconsolately in the doorway.

  Dwight sighed and laid the hockey tickets on the dresser. “I really am sorry, son.”

  “It’s okay,” Cal said gamely. “Brind’Amour might not even be playing tonight.”

  “Don’t wait supper,” Dwight told me as he started back down the hall. “This could take a while.”

  “That’s all right,” I said. “And if you get home first, you don’t have to wait up for us.”

  That stopped them both in their trac
ks and Cal looked at me in sudden hope as he saw the tickets in my hand.

  I smiled back at him. “Well, I’ve got a driver’s license, too, you know. And I know how to get to the RBC Center. You just have to promise not to get embarrassed if I yell ‘High sticking!’ at the wrong time, okay?”

  “Okay!”

  Home court for NC State’s basketball team and home ice for the Carolina Hurricanes, the RBC Center is named for the Royal Bank of Canada—part of the global economy we keep hearing about. It’s less than ten years old and sits on eighty acres that used to be farms and woodlands, just west of Raleigh and easily accessible by I-40. It was supposed to cost $66 million and seat 23,000. It wound up costing $158 million and seats only 20,000. Was there ever a public project that didn’t cost at least twice as much as originally estimated?

  When Dwight and Seth and I were figuring how much it’d cost to add on a new master bedroom, we actually overestimated by a thousand. Either we’re smarter than those professional consultants who get paid big money out of the state’s budget or else those consultants maybe fudge the figures so that legislators won’t panic and refuse to fund a project until it’s too late to back out.

  Even though I’m a Carolina fan, I don’t begrudge the Wolfpack their new arena. I just wish it could’ve been named for something a little less commercial than a Canadian bank.

  On the drive in, Cal tried to bring me up to speed on the rules and logic of the game and I really did try to concentrate, but it was so much gobbledygook.

  When we got to the entrance, orange-colored plastic cones divided the various lanes and he knew which lane would get us to the parking lot closest to our seats. Inside, we bought pizza and soft drinks, then found our seats in the club section, which was sort of like first balcony in a regular theater. Up above us, the retired jerseys of various NCSU basketball players hung from the rafters. Down below us, red-garbed hockey players warmed up on the gleaming white ice.

  Don’t ask me who the Hurricanes played that night. I don’t have a clue. But a couple of minutes into play, the Canes scored the first goal and the whole building went crazy. Cal and every other kid in the place jumped to their feet and waved their hockey sticks. Men high-fived, women hugged and screamed, horns blared, and the near-capacity crowd roared maniacal cheers of triumph, while flashing colored lights chased themselves around the rim of our section in eye-dazzling brilliance.

  Wow!

  CHAPTER 3

  Shall we ask, Am I my brother’s keeper? Or say in the language of a former cabinet officer, “Gentlemen, this is not my funeral.”

  —Profitable Farming in the Southern States, 1890

  DWIGHT BRYANT

  FRIDAY NIGHT, FEBRUARY 24

  Even before he turned onto Ward Dairy Road, Dwight could see flashing lights in the distance. When he got there, state troopers were directing homeward-bound commuter traffic through a single lane around the scene, so he turned on his own flashers behind the grille of his truck, slowed to a crawl as he approached, and flipped down the sun visor to show the card that identified him as an officer of the Colleton County Sheriff’s Department. Activity seemed to be centered directly in front of Bethel Baptist, between the entrance and exit driveways that circled the churchyard. He started to power down his window, but the troopers recognized him and immediately shunted him into the first drive. He parked and pulled on the new wool gloves Deborah had given him for Christmas, grabbed his flashlight, and walked over toward the others.

  Most of the county roads had wide shoulders and this one was no exception. Even with the yellow tape that delineated the crime scene, there would have been enough room for two cars to pass had there not been so many official vehicles gathered around like a flock of buzzards there for the kill, as his father-in-law would say.

  Trooper Ollie Harrold gave him an informal two finger salute. “Over here, Major Bryant,” he said, illuminating a path for Dwight with his torch.

  Yellow tape had been looped across a shallow ditch and was secured to the low illuminated church sign a few feet away. Inside the tape’s perimeter, the focus of all their attention, two brawny legs lay side by side—male, to judge by their muscular hairiness. Even in the fitful play of flashlights, Dwight could see that they were a ghastly white, drained of all blood. He aimed his own flash at the upper thighs. The bones that protruded were mangled and splintered as if hacked from the victim’s torso with an axe or heavy cleaver. No clean-sawn cut. No apparent blood on the wintry brown grass beneath them either, which indicated that the butchery had taken place elsewhere.

  The pasty-faced man who had reported them was a thoroughly shaken local who worked at a nearby auto repair shop and who now stood shivering in a thin jacket that did not offer much protection against the sharp February wind.

  “I was riding home,” he said, “when I saw ’em a-laying there in the ditch. Almost fell in the ditch myself a-looking so hard ’cause I couldn’t believe what I was a-seeing. I went straight home and called y’all, then came back here to wait.”

  Dwight glanced at the rusty beat-up bicycle propped against one of the patrol cars behind them. “Bit chilly to be riding a bike.”

  “Yeah, well . . .” The words trailed off in a shamefaced shrug.

  “Lost your license?”

  “Used to be, you had to blow a ten to have ’em take it.” The man sounded aggrieved. “I only blew a eight-five, but the judge still took it. I’m due to get it back next month.”

  “There’s no light on your bike,” Dwight said, looking from the bicycle to the grisly limbs in the shallow ditch.

  “I know, but I got reflecting tape on the pedals and fenders and on my jacket, too. See?” He turned around to show them. “Didn’t need my own light to see that, though. People don’t dim their high beams for bicycles.”

  “You ride past here on your way to work?”

  The man nodded. “And ’fore you ask, no, they won’t here this morning. I’m certain sure I’d’ve seen ’em.”

  The officer assigned to patrol this area was already on the scene and others of Dwight’s people started to arrive. Detective Mayleen Richards was first, followed by Jamison and Denning on the crime scene van. As they set up floodlights so that Percy Denning could photograph the remains from all angles, Richards took down the witness’s name and address and the few pertinent facts he could tell them, then Dwight thanked him for his help and told him he was free to go.

  “I can get someone to run you home.”

  “Naw, that’s all right. Like I say, I just live around the curve yonder.” He seemed reluctant to leave.

  An EMT truck was called to transport the legs over to Chapel Hill to see what the ME could tell them from a medical viewpoint.

  “We already checked with the county hospitals,” Detective Jack Jamison reported. “No double amputees so far. McLamb’s calling Raleigh, Smithfield, Fuquay, and Fayetteville.”

  “We have any missing persons at the moment?” Dwight asked.

  “Just that old man with Alzheimer’s that walked away from that nursing home down in Black Creek around Christmas. His daughter’s still on the phone to us almost every day.”

  Despite an intensive search with a helicopter and dogs, the old man had never been found.

  “I hear the family’s suing the place for a half a million dollars,” said Mayleen Richards.

  “A half-million dollars for an eighty-year-old man?” Jamison was incredulous.

  “Well, a nursing home in Dobbs wound up paying fifty thousand for the woman they lost and she was in her nineties. And think if it was your granddaddy,” said Richards, a touch of cynicism in her voice. “Wouldn’t it take a half-million to wipe out your pain and mental anguish?”

  Jamison took another look at those sturdy legs. In the glare of Denning’s floodlight, they looked whiter than ever. “That old guy was black, though, and they said he didn’t weigh but about a hundred pounds.”

  “Too bad we don’t have even some shoes and socks to give
us a lead on who he was or what he did,” said Richards. “You reckon he’s workboots or loafers?”

  She leaned in for a closer look. “No corns or calluses and the toenails are clean. Trimmed, too. I doubt if they gave him a pedicure first.”

  It was another half hour before the EMT truck arrived. While they waited, Denning carefully searched the grass inside the perimeter. “Not even a cigarette butt,” he said morosely.

  The patrol officer was equally empty-handed. “I drove down this road a little after four,” he reported. “It was still light then. I can’t swear they weren’t there then, but shallow as that ditch is, I do believe I’d’ve noticed.”

  A reporter from the Dobbs Ledger stood chatting with someone from a local TV station. Because neither was bumping up against an early deadline, they had waited unobtrusively until Dwight could walk over and give them as much as he had.

  The television reporter repositioned her photogenic scarf, removed her unphotogenic woolly hat, and fluffed up her hair before the tape began to roll. “Talking with us here is Major Dwight Bryant from the Colleton County Sheriff’s Department. Major Bryant, can you give us the victim’s approximate age?”

  Dwight shook his head. “He could be anything from a highschool football player to a vigorous sixty-year-old. It’s too soon to say.” Looking straight into the camera, he added, “The main thing is that if you know of any white male that might be missing, you should contact the Sheriff’s Department as soon as possible.”

  Both reporters promised they would run the department’s phone numbers with their stories.

  Eventually, the emergency medical techs arrived, drew on latex gloves, bagged the legs separately, then left for Chapel Hill. The yellow tape was taken down and the reporters and patrol cars dispersed, along with their witness, who pedaled off into the night.

  “We probably won’t hear much from the ME till we find the rest of him,” Mayleen Richards said.

  “Well-nourished white male,” Denning agreed. “They’ll give us his blood type, but what good’s that without a face or fingerprints?”