Rituals of the Season dk-11

by Margaret Maron

  “Well, now, Doug,” said Bo, “we haven’t exactly talked to them about this yet. Whitley’s one of mine and I’m not gonna jump to any conclusions till I hear what he has to say.”

  Dwight nodded in agreement. “No point limiting the investigation at this point. They’ve got better resources. Might as well see what they can turn up.”

  They discussed it a few minutes more, then Woodall sighed, drained his mug, and stood to go. “I just hope to hell Whitley turns up before Thursday.”

  As the door closed behind the DA, Dwight looked at his boss. “You didn’t tell him about Whitley’s e-mail.”

  “Did I tell him I might have a deputy who’s gone somewhere to maybe kill himself? No.” He set his mug on the shelf behind his desk. “Which is it, Dwight? A love affair gone sour or something to do with the job?”

  Dwight shook his head. “Can’t say, Bo. One thing we do know is that she was looking into the Martha Hurst conviction.”

  “Martha Hurst? Who the hell’s that?”

  “A Cotton Grove woman sitting on death row over in Raleigh. Due to take that gurney ride next month.”

  “Oh yeah. Beat the living hell out of her boyfriend with a baseball bat if I remember rightly?”

  “Ex-boyfriend, current stepson,” Dwight said. “And it was a softball bat.”

  “Baseball, softball, what’s the connection with Tracy and Whitley? Neither one of them was around when that case went down.”

  “I don’t know that there’s a connection,” Dwight admitted, “but just this past week, Tracy pulled the trial records and then she called over to Lee and Stephenson’s and asked if she could go through Brix Junior’s files. He was the one appointed to defend Hurst.”

  “Yeah, I remember now. It was a cakewalk.”

  “You work the investigation?” Dwight asked.

  Bo Poole shook his head. “Just kept tabs on the reports. That was a hellacious summer. Four killings in a row. One right after another, and the worst was that little Langdon girl, remember? Oh, no, that’s right. You weren’t here then either.”

  “I heard about it though. A five-year-old? Went missing from her grandmother’s backyard?”

  “Yeah. Three weeks before we found her body. Tore everybody up something awful. We were stretched thinner than an elephant’s rubber that summer.” He sighed and leaned back in his leather chair. “You gonna look into this Hurst business?”

  “I think we have to.”

  Faded blue eyes met dark brown ones in a long level gaze.

  “This gonna come back and bite me in the ass, Dwight?”

  “I hope not, Bo, but it’s something we’ve got to do. If she’s innocent—”

  “My fault if that’s how it turns out. I put Jones on it. I knew he was a screwup, but I couldn’t spare anybody else right then. Thought it was so open and shut even he couldn’t mess it up. ’Specially with the SBI looking over his shoulder. ’Course now, maybe they used a screwup on that case, too.” He got up and poured himself another mug of black coffee, even though the ulcer that had started with his wife’s losing fight with cancer already wrenched his belly. “Talk to them and keep me posted.”

  Out on the interstate, Deputy Silas Lee Jones pulled the earflaps of his wool cap down over his ears and watched sourly as Percy Denning, Mike Castleman, and Eddie Lloyd made like those forensic specialists on television. Cold enough to freeze the brass balls off a frigging monkey and they were pulling tape and punching numbers into a calculator and talking about trajectories when they didn’t have a clue in hell where that slug had gone after it passed through Tracy Johnson’s neck and shattered the window.

  Yeah, they were starting from the new glass fragments they’d found by the edge of the outer northbound lane, fragments that came from the window of her car. Big damn deal.

  But Major Bryant had ordered another sweep with the metal detectors, and another sweep he was going to get even if they all came down with flu for frigging Christmas. He stomped out his cigarette, pulled his gloves back on, and switched on the metal detector. Taking his own sweet time, he began to move it back and forth over the dry and brittle grass along the highway. The damn thing pinged every thirty seconds for stray bolts and screws, bits of chrome, bottle caps, a busted cell phone, even small rocks with traces of iron ore; and every ping meant he had to bend over and poke through the grass till he found the cause.

  His ample paunch did not make for easy bending.

  “Hey, Jones,” Denning called from the west side of the northbound lanes. “We’re gonna grid off a section up yonder.”

  “Up yonder” was on the southbound side of the four lanes, but several feet forward from where they had found the glass. They waited for traffic to clear, then darted across to a spot where they began to unwind yellow tape to grid off the area.

  As the morning wore on, though, the only positive thing was the upward turn of the thermometer.

  Back when Martha Hurst lived in Sandy Grove Mobile Estates, the trailer park was mostly white. These days it was thoroughly mixed—white, black, Latino, and even a few Asians for good measure, which meant that no one gave Kayra Stewart and Nolan Capps the racist attitude they might have received a few years earlier.

  It was an older park, with towering pine trees and mature oaks that had dropped a thick layer of leaves and straw. Some of the dilapidated trailers had weathered to a dreary gray and several almost disappeared into the overgrown azalea bushes and head-high privet. The evergreen bushes gave the closely spaced dwellings an unexpected sense of privacy. Most of the small yards were unraked patches of wiregrass trampled bare by the eight or ten preschool children who seemed to romp unwatched by any adults. They darted in and out of the bushes like small winter finches and their knit hats and gloves were the only bright bits of color here, those and parts of broken plastic toys abandoned amid the leaves: a blue plastic trike with no wheels, a red sand pail, a turquoise-and-yellow Barbie dollhouse stained by rainwater that had dripped from the oaks.

  Lot #81 was now occupied by a newish model. Strings of clear white lights turned the sheltering bushes into makeshift Christmas trees. A plastic snowman sat beside the steps and a wreath of artificial holly hung on the door. The shy young woman who answered their knock looked so pregnant that Nolan almost expected to see a donkey tied up by the deck, waiting to take her to a stable in Bethlehem.

  Kayra launched into their spiel, but slowed as she realized the woman was shaking her head. “You don’t speak English?”

  “No hablo,” she agreed with a regretful smile.

  “Don’t look at me,” said Nolan. “I took French.”

  No one was home at 83 or 85, but at 82 they got lucky. “Naw, I’ve only been here four years,” said the black man who opened the door. “Who you wanna try is Miz Apple, lives down there on the bend. She’s been here forever.”

  “Well, not forever, but surely the longest,” said the elderly white woman when they repeated 82’s recommendation. “But y’all come on in. It’s too cold to stand here with the door open.”

  Inside was so warm that the kids immediately unwrapped their scarves, loosened their jackets, and stuffed their gloves in their pockets. The trailer was a single-wide and the tiny living room was crowded with a loveseat covered in colorful crocheted afghans, a red plush recliner, and a fifteen-inch portable television. A small artificial tree blinked cheerfully from atop the television and dozens of Christmas cards were clipped to tinsel garlands that hung across the window tops like multicolored valences.

  Mrs. Apple gestured for them to take the loveseat, and as she sat down in the recliner, she adjusted the window curtain beside her chair so that she could keep an eye on the road, then picked up a crochet hook and resumed work on a pale pink crib blanket that was as soft and fluffy as her white hair. “For a neighbor’s granddaughter,” she murmured and looked at them expectantly.

  “We were hoping you could tell us about Martha Hurst,” said Kayra.

  “I was wondering what ya�
�ll were wanting when I seen you going door to door like that. Martha Hurst! Now there’s a name out of the past, idn it? Poor Martha. Did they kill her yet?”

  “She’s due to die next month. Did you know her?”

  “Oh child, I know everybody,” she said with a complacent glance at the many greeting cards that mutely testified to her gregariousness. “And I knowed that sorry Roy, too. No loss to the world that ’un was. Would you believe that he took a kittycat used to sit on my little porch here and throwed it through Martha’s window one time?”

  “Was it hurt?” asked Kayra in concern.

  “Oh, it won’t a real cat. Cement. Like a doorstop. But he sure did bust its head off.”

  As if summoned by memory, a gray cat strolled out of the kitchen, sniffed them both, and jumped up into Nolan’s lap.

  “Now that’s not something he does with everybody comes in,” said Mrs. Apple. “You must have cats yourself.”

  “No, ma’am,” he said, “but I do like them.”

  “They always know.” Her crochet hook flashed in and out as the pink blanket grew beneath her fingers. “Now what was it y’all were wanting to hear about Martha?”

  “The day Roy Hurst was killed,” said Kayra. “Were you here then?”

  Mrs. Apple beamed in anticipation of fresh ears for an old tale. “Oh yes. I’d just retired from my job with the county so I was still having fun doing nothing. I cooked for forty years out at the hospital where Martha used to work. Fact is, I put in a word for her when they won’t gonna hire her on account of some trouble she got in back when she was younger. She was an aide and I was a cook. We used to ride in to work together sometimes. Anyhow, it was a real hot day and my air conditioner was broke so the windows was open and I heard some of the yelling. Iris—Iris Ford—she was the one lived next door to them. She was out watering her flowers and she said he was hot as fire ’cause Martha was telling him to get the rest of his mess out of their trailer ’cause she was gonna change the doorlocks soon as she got back from the beach. See, he used to live there with his daddy and she was one of the women he used to bring home with him, only after she met Gene, she didn’t want to have nothing more to do with Roy. He stayed on awhile after they was married, but they didn’t get along. I don’t know if he was jealous ’cause his daddy got her or if he just didn’t want to have to pay rent on a place of his own. They had a knock-down-drag-out and he come screeching out in that raggedy ol’ black car of his like a bat out of you-know-where. Almost hit some little girls playing jumprope right out here in front of my house. And that was the last time any of us ever seen him alive. About a hour later, she went off with her ballbats.”

  “Did he come back while Martha was at her ball game?”

  “Not that anybody here seen. ’Course, Iris and me, we went for groceries about then, so I reckon he could’ve come and gone again.”

  “What about after?”

  “I just told you, honey. Didn’t nobody see him after he went tearing off like that on Saturday morning.”

  “But he was killed in the trailer.”

  “That’s right, and me and Iris, we couldn’t figure out when he got there less’n he sneaked in before she got home. See, after a game, she’d come home just long enough to tote her stuff in the house and get a shower and then go out drinking with her friends.”

  The old woman shook her head. “I went to bed at ten that night and I didn’t see her come home, but Iris said it musta been around midnight. Not that she got up to look. She knowed the sound of Martha’s car, though. If he was there and if they was fighting, they did it real quiet. Iris never heard a thing. ’Course now, she wouldn’t, would she? She always took her hearing aid off when she went to bed. I remember one time—”

  The trailer was so hot and airless that Nolan slipped off his jacket and wished he could crack open a window. He glanced at Kayra, who sat there with a frozen smile of politeness on her face while the torrent of words gushed over them.

  “—so I said, if you’d’ve put on your hearing aid soon as you seen it, you’d’ve—”

  “And nobody heard them fight that night?” he interrupted.

  “Not a peep. Next morning, Martha was up early. Loaded up her car with stuff and took off. To the beach is what we heard, though how she could just walk away and leave him laying there’s something I never could understand.”

  “When did you realize that Roy Hurst was still in the trailer?”

  “Didn’t know for sure till the deputies come on Friday.”

  “But you thought—?” Kayra prodded.

  “Well, yeah, long about Wednesday, Iris noticed that his car was parked round back of the trailer where he used to park when he was living there. Them bushes used to be a little thinner back then. Now you could hide a herd of elephants behind Maria’s place.”

  “The sheriff’s department got an anonymous call that there was a dead man in the trailer. Who do you suppose made that call?”

  “I don’t know nothing about that,” she said and her crochet hook flashed even faster, in and out of the intricate loops of pink yarn. The tree lights blinked on and off and the cat rearranged itself in Nolan’s lap.

  “I know I’d have been curious,” Kayra said coaxingly.

  The hooked needle slowed, then Mrs. Apple shrugged her stooped shoulders. “Reckon it won’t do no harm to say now. It was Iris called ’em. The place’d been so still and quiet, which it wouldn’t’ve been if he was crashing there. He’d’ve been in and out all hours, revving up that car motor, but the car didn’t move. Another thing—it was hot, hot, hot, and the windows was all closed up and her air conditioner won’t running. Anyhow, Iris, she got me to go over with her and knock on the back door. And then we looked in the window and we could see him a-laying there.”

  By noontime, Deputy Jack Jamison felt as if he’d spent the day chasing his own tail around in circles.

  First, he got a warrant from one of the magistrates, then he and Raeford McLamb drove out to Whitley’s trailer to find some DNA samples. The patrol officer watching the place said there’d been no sign of the missing deputy. Inside, after bagging up Whitley’s toothbrush, razor, and a comb with some hair still caught in the teeth, they did a quick-and-dirty. Tucked down in a drawerful of socks was an unmarked jeweler’s box that held a gold-and-turquoise cuff bracelet that looked like the one in the sketch Mayleen Richards had shown them. They took it back to the courthouse with them and logged it in with the property clerk.

  After that, while McLamb took the personal items over to the lab, Jamison went out to speak to Tracy Johnson’s cleaning woman, a middle-aged white woman who’d been laid off from her clerical job when her company outsourced its routine data processing to New Delhi.

  “Cleaning houses is harder, but it beats working at one of them big discount stores,” she told Jamison. “I’m my own boss. Set my own hours. This way, I can at least help feed my kids and buy medical insurance. It’s a high deductible but if anything really bad happens to me or my husband, we’re covered. Besides, lessen you’re management, them places won’t give you any benefits either.”

  She told Jamison that Tracy was easy to work for. “I came in four hours a week. Dusted. Vacuumed. Mopped the floors. Changed the bed, cleaned the bathroom, did the laundry. Just her and the baby and she kept the place tidy. Some people, you wouldn’t believe what pigs.”

  Her main complaint seemed to be that Tracy was too by-the-letter. “She could be a little tight-assed, if you’ll pardon my French. Everybody else pays me off the books, in cash. She paid by check and she took out every penny of taxes and Social Security, too. Cost us both, but she said she was an officer of the court and she couldn’t look the other way on it. Even preached me a little sermon about the obligations of citizenship and how taxes are like greens fees, only we get to play democracy instead of a round of golf. Like I’ve ever been on a golf course. Or had much democracy either for that matter.”

  She gave a sad smile. “And then she turned aro
und and gave me a nice check for my birthday. For more than she’d withheld.”

  “What about men?” Jamison asked.

  The woman shrugged. “Yeah, but don’t ask me who. I never saw him. Just signs that somebody did stay over once in a while. He was always gone when I got there. Her, too, for that matter. Sometimes she’d get home before I left, but most times, I’d go a month or more without laying eyes on her or the baby either.”

  “What do you mean by signs?”

  “Extra towels in the laundry. Whiskers in the sink where he’d shaved and then didn’t wipe out the bowl. Beer cans in the garbage, and she drank wine. Condom wrappers in the bathroom wastebasket. Extra glasses in the dishwasher. Two coffee mugs left in the sink. The sheets. If you look, you can tell.”

  “Would you say he was here this week?”

  She considered. “Maybe not Friday morning. It was just the one cup and the bathroom sink was clean. And there weren’t as many extra towels as there have been, but I did see a couple of beer cans and a condom wrapper, so yeah, I’d say he stayed overnight at least once.”

  “Thanks,” said Jamison, closing his notebook as he stood to go. “You’ve been very helpful.”

  “Can’t help myself from noticing things.” Her face brightened. “Hey, maybe I ought to put in an application at the sheriff’s department. I could be a detective, too. How good are the benefits?”

  Jamison laughed. “Benefits are fine if you don’t mind the shift changes.”

  He glanced at his watch as he left. He hadn’t eaten lunch yet and his interview with the prisoner who’d sent Tracy a death threat wasn’t for another hour. Plenty of time to swing by the house and grab a sandwich and maybe play with Jack Junior for a few minutes.

  The receptionist at the pediatrician’s office in Raleigh was properly solemn about the death of their small patient and the patient’s mother, but she wanted to make it clear to Deputy Richards that Dr. Trogden was conferring an enormous favor by shortening his lunch hour in order to talk to her. “I hope you won’t keep him longer than is strictly necessary.”