Hard Row

by Margaret Maron

  Then, hesitantly, he framed a question and King looked at Dwight. “He wants to know if fingerprints show up on everything.”

  “Like what?”

  King gave a hands-up gesture of futility. “He won’t say.”

  Dwight considered for a long moment, his brown eyes fixed on the Mexican, who dropped his own eyes. Dwight had never thought of himself as intuitive. He put more faith in connecting the dots than in leaping over them. But Deborah had been a judge for four years. Hundreds of liars and con artists had stood before her. If it was her opinion that Sanaugustin’s question was to get confirmation of something suspected but not positively known, surely that counted for something. But if that were the case, why was this guy worried about fingerprints? Unless—?

  “Tell him that yes, we can lift fingerprints off of wooden doors,” he said, hoping to God that Denning had indeed dusted the doors of that bloody abattoir. “And if he touched the car, his prints will be there as well.”

  When translated, his words unleashed such a torrent of Spanish that even King was taken aback. He motioned for his client to slow down. At least twice in the narrative, the man crossed himself.

  Eventually, he ran out of words, crossed himself a final time, and waited for King to turn to Dwight and repeat what had been said.

  Everyone at the camp had heard about the body parts that were appearing along the length of their road, he had told King. They had even, may God forgive them, joked about it. But no one connected it with their farm. How should they? It was an Anglo thing, nothing to do with them. As for him, yes, he had once been a heavy user, but now he was trying to stay clean for the sake of the children. That’s why he gave most of his money to his wife to save for them. But on Saturday Juan had sent him over to the sheds to get a tractor hitch and he went to the wrong shed by mistake. Inside was the big boss’s car and that made him curious. Why was the car there? Then when he got closer, he heard the flies and smelled the stench of blood. Lots of blood. Bloody chains lay on the floor. Nearby, a bloody axe.

  He had panicked, slammed the door shut, then found the tractor hitch he’d been sent for. As soon as he could get away, he had made his wife give him money and had come into town to buy something that would take away the sight and the smell. That was the truth. On his mother’s grave he would swear it.

  Ever since a killer had suckered him with a convincing show of grief and bewilderment over the death of a spouse, Dwight no longer trusted his instincts as to whether someone was lying or telling the truth, but there was something about the man’s show of exaggerated wide-eyed innocence at the end that made him wonder if they were hearing the whole story.

  “Who did he tell?”

  “He says nobody.”

  “Ask him who hated his boss enough to do that?”

  Again the negative shrug and a refusal to speculate.

  “Juan Santos? Sid Lomax?”

  But Rafael Sanaugustin continued to swear that this was the full extent of his knowledge and beyond that they could not budge him.

  Dwight switched off the tape recorder and carried it back out to the desk, leaving Millard King to discuss the possession charges with his client.

  When Juan Santos and the two women returned, he had them go around to his office with him. According to the jailer’s log, no one had visited Sanaugustin since he was locked up Saturday night, so the likelihood of their having conferred was minimal but not wholly out of the question because he’d used his one phone call to tell Santos where he was. When Dwight first asked about Sanaugustin’s movements on Saturday, Santos did not immediately mention sending him for a tractor hitch. That detail was sandwiched in between their problems with one of the tractors and how they were falling behind schedule with the spring plowing, and it seemed to come almost as an afterthought, as if it were something of little importance. Despite rigorous questioning, all three denied knowing what Sanaugustin had seen on Saturday and all declared that they had first learned of it and of Buck Harris’s death when Dwight was out there on the farm yesterday.

  Dwight stared at them in frustration. Impossible to know who really knew what, but he was willing to bet that Señora Sanaugustin knew more than she was willing to admit. Wives usually did. True to his word, though, he turned them all loose at two o’clock and reached for his phone to call Richards and bring her up to date on what he’d learned.

  She sounded equally dispirited when she reported that they had come up pretty dry as well. “But we did learn that Mrs. Harris was out here on the farm that Monday,” she said. “And at least it’s stopped raining.”

  CHAPTER 25

  The employer who treats his help fairly and reasonably in all respects is the one who will, as a general rule, secure the best results from their service.

  —Profitable Farming in the Southern States, 1890

  No sooner did Juan Santos and the two women leave, than Dwight’s phone rang. It was Pete Taylor.

  “Sorry, Bryant, but Mrs. Harris’s daughter is flying in this afternoon and she can’t make it up to Dobbs today. What about tomorrow morning?”

  “Fine,” said Dwight. “Nine o’clock?”

  “That’ll work for her. And . . . uh . . . this is a little gruesome, but she was asking me about funeral arrangements for Harris. The daughter’s going to want to know. But his head’s still missing, isn’t it?”

  “’Fraid so, Taylor,” he said, seeing no need for the daughter to know what else was missing. “I know it’s weird for her, but we may not find it for months. If ever. The ME’s probably ready to release what we do have, though.”

  “I’ll get back to you on that,” said Taylor. “See you in the morning. Nine o’clock.”

  With his afternoon unexpectedly clear, Dwight called McLamb and got an update on the Mitchiner case. Because the two deputies would not be speaking to the old man’s daughter till five, Dwight sent them to question some witnesses about a violent home invasion that had taken place in Black Creek over the weekend. “While you’re in that neighborhood, try dropping the name of Mitchiner’s daughter. See if she has any enemies who might have thought that they’d hurt her if they hurt him.”

  After attending to a few more administrative details, Dwight called Richards to say that he was coming out to the Buckley place. “Tell Mrs. Samuelson we want to speak to her again.”

  “Should I try questioning Sanaugustin’s wife when she gets here?”

  “Not if the men are around. If she’s going to talk at all, it’ll probably be when they’re not there.”

  Despite the gory murder and the puzzle of Mitchiner’s hand, Dwight felt almost lighthearted as he drove out along Ward Dairy Road. The sun was breaking through the clouds, trees were beginning to bud and more than one yard sported bright bursts of yellow forsythia bushes. The rains would have settled the dirt around the roots of the trees they had planted this weekend, and whatever the problems with Cal, Deborah seemed to be taking them in stride.

  He was not particularly superstitious but he caught himself checking the cab of the truck for some wood to touch.

  Just to be on the safe side.

  After years of wanting what he thought he could never have, these last few months had been so good that he was almost afraid he was going to jinx his luck by even acknowledging it. He told himself to concentrate instead on the cases at hand.

  Start with Mitchiner. An old man with a fading grasp on reality. Had he wandered away on his own or had someone taken him? The hand proved that someone knew where his body was because it had been cut loose and carried from that isolated spot on Black Creek downstream to a more frequented place on Apple Creek. Why?

  Because they wanted the hand to be found? Because they knew it would lead back to the body further upstream?

  Deborah was fond of asking “Who profits?” but on the face of it, no one. Yes, Mitchiner’s daughter was suing the rest home, but that was almost reflexive these days even though most such cases no longer generated large settlements. Besides, everyone
said that she and her son were devoted to the old man. Before he got his driver’s license, the kid rode his bicycle over there after school almost every afternoon to play checkers with him; after he turned sixteen, he came as regularly to take his grandfather out for a drive around town. The daughter was there a couple of nights a week and again on the weekends. On Saturdays, she had seen to his physical well-being, trimming his hair and toenails and seeing that he bathed properly. On Sundays, she had taken him to church for his spiritual well-being.

  According to the statements given when Mitchiner first went missing, he liked to visit the graveyard where his wife and parents were buried and to walk the old neighborhood, so that’s where their first search efforts had been concentrated. How had he wound up in the creek, miles from his childhood haunts?

  And Buck Harris.

  Everyone said he was a bull of a man, a physical man who still liked to climb on a tractor and stay hands-on with every aspect of his crops, yet always up for sex. Whose ox had he gored?

  The possibilities were almost endless. One of the migrants at the camp? Someone he had done business with? Someone whose woman he’d taken? Certainly someone familiar with that empty shed. Mrs. Samuelson had said the killer must be “a hateful and hating man.” He couldn’t argue with that. To kill and butcher and then strew the parts around for the buzzards?

  And yeah, spouses and lovers were usually their best suspects, but surely no woman would have done what was done to Harris? On the other hand, that missing part of his anatomy certainly did seem to suggest a sexual motive. But what in God’s name could he have done to inspire such cruelty? Think of gaining consciousness to find yourself lying there in chains, naked and vulnerable as a killer lifts an axe and swings it down on your bone and flesh. The killer clearly meant for him to know it was coming, otherwise why the chains? Why not just go ahead and kill him quickly and cleanly?

  If Harris was lucky, the first blow would have made him black out from the shock to his system. If he wasn’t lucky—?

  Dwight tried to cleanse the images from his mind.

  Mayleen Richards and Jack Jamison were waiting for him near the rear of Buck Harris’s homeplace. Two old-fashioned bench swings hung from the limbs of an enormous oak tree and the deputies seemed to be enjoying the warm afternoon sunshine, although Richards’s dispirited greeting made Dwight think that Jamison must have told her about his resignation.

  “Where’s Denning?” he asked.

  “He’s back at the shed, going over the car with a fine- tooth comb,” Jamison said.

  “I thought he did that last night.”

  “He did, but you know Denning.”

  Dwight nodded. Attention to detail and a willingness to check and recheck were precisely why he’d promoted Percy Denning to the job.

  He glanced inquiringly at the shabby, unfamiliar car parked at the edge of the yard.

  “Mrs. Samuelson’s got those two migrant women helping her give the place a good cleaning. They got here about ten minutes ago,” Richards said. “She expects Mrs. Harris and her daughter to stay here tomorrow night. She also seems to think the daughter inherits this place.”

  “She’s right,” said Dwight as he rang the back doorbell. “At least, that’s what his lawyer told me.”

  After a minute or two with no answer, he rang again. There was another short wait, then Mrs. Samuelson opened the door with a visible annoyance that was only slightly tempered by seeing him there instead of the two deputies again. Today, her white bib apron covered a short-sleeved maroon dress and it was nowhere near as crisp as the first time she had talked to them. This apron had seen some serious action.

  “I’m sorry, Major . . . Bryant, is it?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Major Bryant, I’m real busy right now.”

  “I’m sure you are, ma’am, but we have a few more questions for you.”

  She started to protest, but then seemed to realize that it would save time in the long run to capitulate and get it over with. She held the door open wide for them, “But please wipe your feet on the mat. We already mopped the kitchen floor.”

  Feeling six years old again, they did as they were told and followed her into the large kitchen. She invited them to sit down at the old wooden table, but there was no offer of coffee or cinnamon rolls today.

  “You know what we found out there in that equipment shed yesterday?” Dwight asked.

  She nodded, her lips tight.

  “That means he was killed by someone familiar with this place. So I ask you again, Mrs. Samuelson. Who on this farm thought they had a reason to kill Mr. Harris?”

  “And I tell you again, Major Bryant, that I don’t know. If it’s something to do with the farm, you need to ask Sid Lomax. If it’s something to do with his personal life, maybe you need to be asking that Smith woman. Maybe she had a boyfriend who didn’t like her messing around with him.”

  “What about Mrs. Harris?”

  “What about her? They split up, but that doesn’t mean she hated him enough to do something like that.”

  “When did you last see her?”

  “Maybe Christmas?” The housekeeper got up and used a paper towel to clean a smudge on the window glass over the sink. With her back to them, she said, “She brought some presents for the children here and she always remembers me at Christmas, too.”

  “She was the one who actually hired you here, wasn’t she?”

  “That’s right.” A fingerprint on the front of the stainless-steel refrigerator seemed to need her attention, too.

  “Mrs. Samuelson.”

  “I’m listening. I can listen and work, too.”

  He got up and went over to look down into her face. “She was here the day he went missing, wasn’t she?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “A bunch of people saw her.”

  She took a deep breath and came back to the table. “All right. Yes. She was here that Monday, but there is no way under God’s blue sky that she could have done that awful thing.”

  “She came to the house?”

  Mrs. Samuelson gave a reluctant nod.

  “What time?”

  “I don’t know. He wasn’t in the house when I came in that morning and I didn’t see his car, so I thought he’d taken off. I figured she’d be coming over to bring some stuff for the camp when the trucks came to move most of the crew back to New Bern, and I reckon he did, too. For all his big talk, she could always get the best of him in an argument and anytime she was coming to check up on things, he’d clear out.”

  She gestured to a door off the kitchen. “There’s a little room in there with a television and a lounge chair so I can take a rest without going out to my apartment. I fixed lunch and then I went in to put my feet up for a few minutes. Only I went to sleep. And when I woke up, she was upstairs taking a shower.”

  “She came all the way from New Bern to take a shower?”

  Mrs. Samuelson gave an impatient shake of her head. “There was a mud puddle down by the camp. Had ice across it, but it wasn’t solid and she backed into it accidentally and wound up sitting down in it. Got soaked to the skin, she said. Cut her leg and her hand, too, so she came over here and took a shower and changed into one of his shirts and an old pair of jeans.”

  “What did she do with her own clothes?”

  “Took ’em home to wash, I reckon. They went out of here in a garbage bag. And before you ask me, it was her own shoes she went out in and they certainly weren’t bloody.”

  Dwight raised a skeptical eyebrow at Mrs. Samuelson’s assertions. “Anybody see her take this tumble?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe one of the women helping me?” She stood as if to go call them.

  “In a minute,” Dwight said. “Your apartment. It’s over the garage, you said?”

  She nodded.

  “So you would hear the door open and Mr. Harris’s car start up?”

  “If it was in the garage. A lot of times
he parked around by the side door.”

  “Where you could see it from your windows?”

  “If I was looking. If he was gone and I didn’t hear him come in during the night, then I’d look out the window first thing every morning to see whether I needed to come over and start breakfast. There’s an intercom, too, and sometimes he’d buzz me and say he wanted breakfast earlier than usual.”

  “So when’s the last time you heard or saw his car?”

  She frowned in concentration, then shook her head. “I’m sorry, Major Bryant. He came and went at all hours and I just can’t fix it in my mind. All I can say is that it wasn’t there Monday morning and I really did put it down to Mrs. Harris coming. Now can I please get back to my work?”

  Dwight nodded. “One thing more though. Who did you really work for, Mrs. Samuelson? Buck Harris or his ex-wife?”

  “He signed my paycheck,” she said promptly.

  “But?”

  She returned his gaze without answering.

  “Is there a Mr. Samuelson? Or do you and Mrs. Harris have that in common as well?”

  Tight-lipped, the housekeeper stood up. “Which one of those women you want to talk to first?”

  Before he could answer, his pager went off and he immediately called in. “Yeah, Faye?”

  “Aren’t you out there at the Harris Farm?”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s a Sid Lomax screaming in my ear for you to come. He says he’s out there in the field. They just found a head.”

  CHAPTER 26

  Successful farmers do not break up a cart or so, and kill a mule or so during each year, and then curse their crops because the price is not high enough to pay for their extravagance.

  —Profitable Farming in the Southern States, 1890

  A clearly shaken Sid Lomax waited in his truck for them at a cut through some woods that separated one of the large fields from the other.

  As Dwight stopped even with him, the farm manager pulled the bill of his cap lower on his forehead. His leathery face was pale beneath its tan and his only comment was a terse, “Follow me,” as his tires dug off in the soft dirt to lead them up a lane at the edge of the field. Dwight put his truck in four-wheel drive and glanced in his mirror. Denning had caught up with him and Richards and Jamison were with him. She must have realized that a car might mire down out here after all the rain. They topped a small rise, then down a gentle slope to where two tractors with heavy turning plows blocked their initial view of a fence post at the far corner of the field.