The Buzzard Table

by Margaret Maron

They put on latex gloves and spread out through the house, where they quickly identified Rebecca Jowett’s bedroom. From the toiletries they found, Mayleen realized that not only did Dave Jowett sleep in the guest bedroom, but he had also been relegated to the guest bathroom.

  Mentally crossing her fingers, she immediately went to the laundry hamper in the master bath.

  “Bingo!” she crowed to Denning, who was right beside her.

  The hamper was three-fourths full, indicating that the missing woman was not someone whose clothes went into the washer downstairs the same day that she took them off. Underpants and bras were tangled in with shirts and ankle socks.

  While an assistant recorded everything with a digital video camera, Denning carefully laid the clothes out on the bathroom floor as if documenting layers from an archaeological dig. Near the top of the hamper was a lace-trimmed bikini brief with stains that made Denning smile when he hooked them out with a gloved finger. “Looks like postcoital vaginal leakage to me,” he said and carefully transferred it to a separate evidence bag. The other undergarments were also bagged and labeled. At the very bottom were a similarly stained pair of underpants.

  They checked the medicine cabinet and the bedside drawers, but except for birth control pills, the only drugs they found were over-the-counter items.

  Her iPad was on the dining table next to her purse, and a quick check of her electronic calendar showed all of her appointments for the year. For Saturday, there were two midday appointments.

  In addition to the Todds, Becca Jowett appeared to be actively involved with two other clients, and she had evidently planned to meet with one of them Sunday afternoon to show a house out in the country.

  Farther down, in the 5:30 slot, was the notation “Reid S.” and an exclamation mark.

  McLamb was examining the missing woman’s purse and wallet and Mayleen showed him the calendar. “What do you think, Ray? Reid Stephenson?”

  “The attorney? Could be.” He grinned. “They say he lights up a lot of women’s lives.”

  Richards copied off the names before sliding the device into another evidence bag.

  “Too bad she took her phone with her,” he said and patted his own phone that was clipped to his belt. “We’re all walking around with almost everything worth knowing about us right here.”

  As Dave Jowett had told them, the computer in their downstairs office appeared to be used solely by him. Apparently he was a trusting soul because nothing was password-protected, not even his email.

  The few messages to or from his wife were the usual innocuous reminders about household matters, appointments, and social engagements. Considering the state of the Jowett marriage, they were surprised to see references to so many of those. Most seemed to be family-related. Both Jowetts were from the county and both sets of parents still lived nearby. There were events for various relatives—“Don’t forget your mom’s birthday on Wednesday,” read one recent message signed “B.”

  Another was, “Jen wants to know if we can come over for bridge tomorrow night.”

  There were also dinners with Dave Jowett’s business associates—“Please don’t forget that Dale’s wife is a Tea Party conservative, so no smug liberal comments, okay?” or “I’ve told the Krongards you had a four-bedroom house on your books and they sounded interested. You might want to have a few pictures on your iPhone when we meet them for drinks tonight.”

  All were signed “xoxo, Dave.”

  “Poor guy,” Richards said. “I guess old habits die hard.”

  Her own phone rang, and Major Bryant’s name appeared on the screen.

  “Is Denning still there?” her boss asked.

  “Yessir.”

  “Good. Sounds like we’ve found Rebecca Jowett’s body.”

  CHAPTER

  10

  The turkey vulture has a highly developed sense of smell, a rare ability among birds. In one study…they quickly found (usually within a day) many chicken carcasses placed under the forest canopy, and some of these were even hidden from view with dried leaves.

  —The Turkey Vulture Society

  Major Dwight Bryant—

  Wednesday afternoon (continued)

  Dwight had almost forgotten about this dead-end dirt-and-gravel road near where he had grown up and still lived. If asked, he would have said it had probably disappeared under the wheels of bulldozers and cement trucks when G. Hooks Talton bought up most of the land on the south side of Possum Creek and built Grayson Village to spite Kezzie Knott, Deborah’s father.

  The incident still brought grins to the faces of those in the know. That a wily old ex-bootlegger with a sixth-grade education had outfoxed a multimillionaire with a full stable of attorneys who hadn’t bothered to read the fine print on the deeds to the farms they thought they were secretly buying up was still good for a laugh over sausage and biscuit breakfasts in any of the gas-and-grub eateries that still survived around Cotton Grove.

  He must have zipped past this narrow unpaved road dozens of times since the big NutriGood grocery store opened, but he’d had no cause to turn onto it in years. Back when he was a teenager, this had been a makeout spot for randy teenagers. In fact, now that he was remembering, it was here in the backseat of his first car, an old Mercury, that he and Patty Sue Milledge had both lost their virginity. Patty Sue was a surgical nurse at WakeMed now, married and the mother of teenagers; and although they never mentioned that night again, they always hugged each other whenever their paths crossed at weddings and funerals and class reunions.

  He briefly wondered if Deborah had ever parked here after a movie or a ball game; if there were a male equivalent to Patty Sue still in the area.

  A single patrol car parked beside the turnoff brought his mind back to the present. He lowered his window to speak to the young officer who held a roll of yellow tape and gestured to the rough track that led through a thick stand of trees.

  “Everybody’s down there, Major,” he said. “The crime scene van got here about fifteen minutes ago.”

  “Thanks, son. Just make sure we don’t get any sightseers till we’re finished.”

  “Yessir!”

  Twigs scraped the sides of his truck as he followed the nearly nonexistent lane. As he oriented himself, he soon realized that he was paralleling a berm that separated this end of Grayson Village and its manicured lawns from wiregrass, sandspurs, and the volunteer pines that had sprung up in what used to be a cotton field. The lane sloped down and he knew that he must be approaching Possum Creek, but the young pines were so thick that he was only a few yards away before he finally spotted the county’s crime scene van and a couple of squad cars.

  Mayleen Richards came over to meet him as he got out of the truck and zipped up his heavy jacket.

  “She’s down there.” The tip of her nose was pink and her breath came in little puffs of steam when she spoke. “We’re just waiting for the ME.”

  The bank dropped off sharply into a gully that ran along the creek, and a section of the track was cordoned off.

  “That where she went over?” he asked.

  “Denning thinks so,” she said. “The leaves and grass look like they were trampled there.”

  In past years, before the county began maintaining waste disposal sites, this had evidently been a popular dumping place. A roll of rotten carpeting lay next to a rusty refrigerator and a broken toilet. Other household appliances were strewn along the creek bank. Black plastic garbage bags had long ago been torn open by foraging animals, the disposable diapers, aluminum pie plates, and pizza boxes spilled out and left to decay amid glass bottles and tin cans that were nearly obscured by years of grapevines and dead leaves. The slender body of a woman dressed in a dark blue warm-up suit and running shoes lay at the near edge of the gully, half covered by a filthy mildewed mattress.

  “I don’t know how she got found,” Richards said. She thumbed her cell phone to show him pictures of the scene before they disturbed it. “She was totally hidden by that mattr
ess. Who called it in, sir?”

  “Faye said it was from an unlisted number. She thought the voice was male and not from around here, but she couldn’t keep him on the line long enough to talk him into IDing himself.”

  Richards smiled. If Faye Myers, their gossipy gregarious dispatcher, couldn’t dislodge the name, no one could.

  Down below, Denning and his assistant were documenting the scene as best they could without further disturbing the body. As they waited a blue jay flew by and crows called to each other from some trees on the other side of the creek. Despite the recent rain, it had been a fairly dry winter and the creek looked a little lower than in winters past.

  A few minutes later, the EMS truck arrived on the heels of the ME, who clambered down into the gully and quickly went through the formality of confirming what they pretty much knew already.

  “Pulpy head wound, no signs of rigor, advancing decomposition,” he said. “Last seen around seven o’clock Saturday? Yeah, that could be about right. Underneath that mattress and next to the dirt? Temperatures above freezing every night since then? Yeah, I’d say dead about three days. They’ll open her up over in Chapel Hill, but I doubt they’ll get it any closer than that.”

  He climbed back up and stood shaking his head as the deputies below lifted the mattress away from the body. “It’s the Jowett woman, isn’t it? Never met her myself, but my sister lives next door to her parents. They’ve been sick with worry. Gonna be a sad time for them.”

  Grabbing hold of a three-foot oak sapling for support, Dwight worked his way down to the dump site and looked into Rebecca Jowett’s chilled white face. Her hair was matted with blood and he could tell that blowflies had found the wound, but everything else looked normal. Odd the way death always relaxed the muscles and wiped away every emotion. No matter how the person died, whether peacefully in bed or in a violent shooting, he had never seen any frowns or grimaces of fear or pain on the faces of the dead, only a smooth disinterested neutrality.

  “Finding anything?” he asked Denning.

  The deputy shook his head in frustration. “Absolutely nothing, Major.”

  He pointed to the edge of the drop-off secured with yellow crime scene tape. “We think she was probably rolled off there and then the mattress pulled over her. Except for the body itself, everything else looks like it’s been here for months.”

  “No shoe tracks around the body?”

  “Just the tip of one. I took pictures but there’s not enough to go on. No tread mark and some big bird must have landed on top of it. Crow or buzzard probably.”

  Both men looked up. Sure enough, three or four of the big birds were drifting on the thermals in wide lazy circles overhead.

  “I don’t suppose anyone thought to look for tire tracks before y’all drove over them?”

  “Wrong, Major. Mayleen and Ray and I, we stopped to check a couple of times on the way back in. Pine straw’s pretty thick and any tire marks would have been washed away in last night’s rain. You can see our own tracks, though.”

  “So whoever found the body and reported it must have walked over.” He turned to Ray McLamb and said, “Do a canvass of the houses there along the back. Maybe it was someone out walking his dog or kids playing. And ask about any activity over this way during the weekend—lights at night, the sound of a vehicle. You know the drill.”

  He climbed back up and told the EMS crew that they could transport the body, then noticed that the trail continued along the creek bank. He got in his truck and followed it a few hundred feet. It circled around another thick stand of slash pines before opening up into a half-abandoned pasture. There was that concrete slab Deborah had told him about and there, too, in the distance was the tenant house.

  He drove back to the dump, gestured for Mayleen to join him, and called the dispatcher. “Hey, Faye. How ’bout you play me back the call you got on this body.”

  After listening closely, he said, “Now play it again for Mayleen,” and handed her his phone.

  When she had thanked the dispatcher and ended the call, Dwight said, “Did that sound like a British accent to you?”

  CHAPTER

  11

  A group of vultures is called a “Venue.” Vultures circling in the air are a “Kettle.”

  —The Turkey Vulture Society

  Sigrid Harald—Wednesday afternoon (continued)

  It was nearing three o’clock before Sigrid and Anne finished eating and were ready to head out of town for the farm where Martin Crawford was camped.

  “Anne? Anne Lattimore? Oh my goodness!” a matronly gray-haired woman exclaimed as they were paying their lunch tab. “I swear, you haven’t changed a bit since high school! Well, maybe a little bit of snow on the roof, but nothing on the waist.”

  The woman patted her own ample waist and enfolded Anne in a hug before she could sidestep it. The face was vaguely familiar, but high school was more than forty years in Anne’s past and she had not attended any of the reunions. Nevertheless, she made herself smile as if in delight and say, “How lovely to see you again after all this time! You’ve met my daughter, haven’t you?”

  From attending exhibits of her mother’s photographs, Sigrid realized that Anne didn’t have a clue as to this woman’s name, but she recognized her cue and dutifully stepped forward with her hand extended. “Hello, I’m Sigrid Harald and you are—?”

  “Mavis Trogden,” the woman said, beaming. “Mavis Rainey, that was. Your mom and I were in the same homeroom the whole four years of high school.”

  She signaled to a short stout woman who had preceded her into the tearoom to claim a table near the back. “Alice Jean, look who’s here! Anne Lattimore!”

  Several minutes of “Remember when?” and “Here’s a picture of my oldest grandchild” passed before Anne could disentangle herself gracefully.

  “Maybe we should go ahead and stop by the bank while we’re this close,” Sigrid said when they were finally out the door.

  The bank was on the next block and it was a replay of the tearoom, this time with a gray-haired executive who came out of his office to take Anne’s hand with shy pleasure, before turning to Sigrid. “You cannot know what a crush I had on this girl when I was sixteen.”

  “Ah, Bobby,” Anne said, automatically dimpling. “If only you’d said something back then.”

  He shook his head. “No, you were always out of my league. And then you went off to New York to study photography the day after graduation and never looked back, but I’ve followed your career, Anne—the Pulitzer, your exhibit at the art museum, that gut-wrenching story you did on poor Somalia a few years ago before it was on the news every night. What a life you’ve led!”

  Eventually, he escorted them back to Mrs. Lattimore’s box. He seemed to know about her condition but was restrained in his sympathy. “One of the old guard,” he said with a slow shake of his head. “We’ll not see her like again, I’m afraid.”

  Anne had brought along a canvas tote and they soon transferred everything from the box. The only thing they opened was a velvet jeweler’s bag that was heavier than expected. When Sigrid loosened the drawstrings and looked inside, she saw a handful of gold coins. “Can’t wait to hear the story that goes with these.”

  “Don’t look at me,” her mother said as she closed the box and slid it back into its slot. “I never saw them before.”

  The bank executive was in conference with someone else when they emerged from the vault area and they managed to get back to the car and lock the tote bag in the trunk without being waylaid again.

  With Anne behind the wheel, they drove out of town on Old Highway 48, then turned onto a nearly deserted secondary road that took them through a part of the county that was still mostly farms.

  Here in February, the fields had a locked-down air as if waiting for spring rains and warm sunshine. The ditchbanks were scruffy with dead weeds and the occasional litter of plastic soda bottles, beer cans, and plastic bags half hidden by the dry brown leaves.

/>   Although she could discuss blood spatter patterns and blunt trauma wounds knowledgeably, Sigrid Harald was, as a rule, oblivious to nature and its cycles. She knew that the sun and the moon rose in the east and set in the west and that water usually flowed downhill, that winter required heavier clothing than summer, that daylight lengthened in the spring and shortened in the fall, ergo the nuisance of daylight saving time. If pressed, she could distinguish a rose from a daisy and a fir tree from an oak, and she could even recognize magnolias because one grew in her grandmother’s front yard. Its branches spread out from the base of the trunk and continued upward for sixty feet. She knew that the thick leathery leaves stayed green year round and were made into wreaths and garlands at Christmastime, even though the huge white blossoms of summer were unsuitable for indoor bouquets.

  As far as she was concerned a more intimate knowledge of nature seemed superfluous. Anything else could be Googled. Wasn’t that what the Internet was for?

  But she was very much aware of her mother’s deepening sadness as Grandmother Lattimore’s condition deteriorated day by day; so when Anne remarked on the beauty of a bare-twigged tree silhouetted against the winter sky, she was willing to keep the conversational ball rolling. “Is that an oak or a maple?”

  “Oak,” said Anne, who could even distinguish the pines, which all looked alike to Sigrid.

  “What about those?” Sigrid asked when they passed a group of trees shrouded in gray, dead-looking vines. “Grapevines or poison oak?”

  “Neither. That’s kudzu. Did I forward you that picture that someone sent me last summer? The vine that went up a light pole and then leafed out at the top and along the wires on either side?”

  “The one they said looked like Christ on the cross?”

  “That’s the one.”

  Sigrid smiled. “I guess if they can see the head of Jesus on a grilled cheese sandwich, why not on a power pole?”

  “Don’t laugh. This is our heritage,” Anne said. “And speaking of our heritage…”