High Country Fall

CHAPTER 26

THURSDAY, 3:50 P.M.

“Hey, Mary Kay,” George Underwood said as they met at the outer door on the lower level. “Playing hooky?” “Just a little bit. We finished up early and Mrs. Vincent said I could cut out early, too,” she said, referring to Lafayette County’s clerk of court.

“Judge Knott’s already gone?”

She nodded. “You missed her by about fifteen minutes.”

Underwood experienced a twinge of disappointment. He was looking forward to telling her of their interview with the UPS driver, who was just now pulling his boxy brown truck out of the parking lot as they watched.

“You sure you remember that Monday?” they had asked him. “Could you maybe be thinking of an earlier day when Mrs. Ledwig actually did take delivery?”

“It was that Monday. That’s when my radio station does the roundup of all the weekend baseball scores, and I wanted to see who the Braves might be going to have to face in the playoffs.”

“And you’re positive it was Mrs. Ledwig? You knew her by sight?”

“I didn’t ask to see her birth certificate, but I’m pretty sure I’ve seen her before. Middle-aged? Blond? ’Bout as tall as me? She was coming around from the back to get in her car. Had the keys in her hand and looked a little like she really wanted me to move it ’cause the truck was blocking the drive. I just handed her the stuff and she went back with ’em the way she’d come.”

Underwood looked at his notes. Tina Ledwig drove a silver Lexus. “What kind of car was it?”

The driver shrugged. “I don’t keep up with the makes. It was a luxury sedan, though. White.”

“I don’t suppose you noticed the license plate?”

“Sorry. I don’t remember the numbers, but the first three letters were S-U-N.”

Underwood, who had been leaning back in his chair, came upright. “You sure about that?”

“About the letters? Sure, I’m sure.”

Underwood swung around to his computer. “I’m going to type up your statement, and while I’m doing that, Detective Fletcher here will need to get your fingerprints so we can eliminate them from the packages.”

Now, the deliveryman was on his way back to Asheville and Underwood took his signed statement into Sheriff Horton’s office.

“You saying Sunny Osborne was at the Ledwig house that afternoon?” asked the sheriff.

“She’s tall, blond, middle-aged, and the license plate on her white Lincoln has the word ‘SUN’ followed by the date she and Osborne were married. They say she swings a mean tennis racket, too,” Underwood told him.

“Jesus!” said Horton. “You serious? You really think she killed Ledwig?”

“I don’t know. All I know is that she was there that afternoon and she didn’t see fit to tell us.”

“Osborne’s body’s still in Chapel Hill. She do him, too?”

He shrugged. “Our DA and Judge Knott both say she was playing a dulcimer the whole time before Osborne went missing.”

Horton’s face brightened. “That’s right. So if she didn’t kill her husband, she didn’t kill Ledwig. She was probably scared to say she was there. Afraid we’d jump to the same conclusions we almost did. You go talk to her, George. Be easy with her. I bet she’ll tell you what really happened.”

“I’ll give her a call. See if I can run up there now.”

On the way back to his office, Underwood paused at the dispatcher’s station. “Any word on Proffitt yet?”

The owner of the Trading Post hadn’t shown up yesterday morning, and when a deputy went to collect him today, he was not to be found.

The dispatcher shook her head. “Nobody’s seen him since night before last. Faye says his shotgun’s still there, but if he went hunting, nothing’s in season for another week. Course that wouldn’t stop ol’ Proffitt, but his truck’s still parked out back. You reckon he’s skipped town?”

“In what?” asked Underwood. “Don’t make it official, but I’ll send somebody out to check his house, and you tell everybody to keep a stray eye out for him, okay?”

“Sure, Captain.”

He went on down to his office and called the Osborne house. The housekeeper who answered said she thought that Mrs. Osborne and her daughter had gone to a funeral home in Howards Ford. “To make the arrangements,” she said with a catch in her voice.

He left his number and asked her to tell Mrs. Osborne to call when she got back.

THURSDAY, 4:30 P.M.

The intercom on Lucius Burke’s desk gave a preliminary crackle, then his secretary’s voice said, “Billy Ed Johnson on line two, Mr. Burke.”

He pressed the right button. “Hey, Billy Ed! How can I do you?”

“Well, I was just wondering if that lady judge is still around the courthouse?”

“Judge Knott? I’m not sure. You want me to have somebody check and see?”

“Well, I’d appreciate it. She was supposed to meet me up here at Eagle Rest, but looks like she’s running late. Only she’s not answering her cell phone either.”

He gave Burke his number and said, “Call me back, hear?”

“Sure thing.” Burke cut the connection and touched the intercom button. “Suanna? Would you see if Judge Knott’s still in the courthouse?”

Out in the anteroom, that young woman rolled her eyes, but pushed back from her computer and went down the hall to the courtroom the visitor had used today. The lights were out. The light was also out in Judge Rawlings’s chambers, but Suanna was nothing if not diligent. She took the stairs down to the lower level and peered out over the parking lot. “Anybody know what kind of car that judge drives?”

Fletcher, on his way back from flirting with the evening dispatcher, said, “Captain Underwood might.”

“Might what?” Underwood called, having heard his name.

“Know what kind of car your judge friend drives,” Fletcher called back.

Underwood came to his doorway. “Who wants to know?”

“Mr. Burke.” As the DA’s secretary, Suanna usually took notes on his calls unless he specifically told her to get off the line. “She was supposed to meet somebody at Eagle Rest at four o’clock and she’s not answering her phone, so they want to know if she’s left yet.”

“Eagle Rest? That’s what? Eighteen, twenty miles?” Underwood went over to the wide glass doors and scanned the lot, but didn’t see her black Firebird. “Mary Kay Kare said she left around three-thirty. She should be there by now.”

He accompanied Suanna back to Burke’s office and was soon dialing the number Billy Ed Johnson had given Burke.

“How did you route her out there?” he asked when Johnson answered.

Within thirty minutes he had retrieved her license plate number from Motor Vehicles, and as the sun sank low in the west he had three units prowling the roads Johnson had specified.

There might be a dozen reasons why she was late, but how many reasons could there be for not answering her cell phone? And maybe he was jumping the gun, but if it was Annie, he’d sure want to know.

With a sigh, he pulled out his wallet and found the number he’d scribbled on the back of a card three days ago, then picked up his phone and dialed the area code for Colleton County.

Deputy Ray Elkins was only twenty-one. He had joined the sheriff’s department in July, shortly after finishing a two-year criminal justice course at the local community college, and he was very much aware of being the new kid with something to prove. Accordingly, he drove fast down the stretch of road he’d been assigned, looking for a black Firebird in obvious trouble—maybe something as simple as a flat tire or broken radiator belt.

Along the way, the young deputy stopped to examine a set of fresh skid marks on the outer lane at the bottom of the second long hill. There were shards of silvered glass on the pavement and he found a smashed side mirror that had been recently torn off a black vehicle and bounced over to the base of the mountain wall; but after walking fifty feet in either direction from the skid marks, he saw no sign that a vehicle had gone over the side.

He wasn’t real sure if this mirror came off a Firebird, but he stuck it in the trunk of his unit anyhow and drove on.

When the quick and dirty failed, Elkins turned around at the end of his assigned stretch and drove back more slowly. As he came up the same hill and rounded a sharp curve, there, about fifty feet past the crest, he saw a short set of skid marks. They continued off the pavement and on across the narrow, leaf-strewn shoulder.

He got out of the car and looked down, taking care not to step on the torn-up weeds and dirt. The tire tracks were so fresh, the exposed dirt had barely begun to dry. If a vehicle had gone off here, though, into this thicket of head-high mountain laurels and hardwoods, it wasn’t immediately apparent. Nevertheless, he climbed down to make sure, holding on to young saplings and laurel branches. Just as he was ready to turn back, a breeze parted the leaves and sunlight gleamed off black metal another twenty feet down.

A crumpled form lay in the bushes beyond the vehicle, and Elkins hesitated. The only dead bodies he’d seen in his short life were properly laid out in caskets in Sunday clothes. For a long moment, he stood there cussing the stupidity of people who don’t buckle up automatically, before his training kicked in and he forced himself to walk over to the body, to squat down and feel for a pulse.

Nothing.

He located the victim’s wallet and driver’s license, then climbed back up to the road, where he thumbed his mike and radioed for help.