Rituals of the Season

CHAPTER 7

The real charity is to keep servants steadily to their duties. Their work should be measured out with a just hand; but it should be regularly exacted in as much perfection as can be expected in variable and erring human nature.

Florence Hartley, The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette, 1873

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 12

When Dwight got to the DA’s office on the second floor of the courthouse, one of Doug Woodall’s assistants, Brandon Frazier, was waiting for him with a stack of manila file folders. “So far as I know, these are all the cases she was working on as of Friday,” he said.

“Which was her desk?” Dwight asked.

“There,” said Frazier, pointing to the one under a window that overlooked the courthouse parking lot.

The huge oaks that would shade cars in the summer were stripped bare of leaves this mild December morning. Only a few cars in the lot today. He watched as one of his detectives, Mayleen Richards, drove in, parked, and crossed the street, where she passed from his view. He made a mental note to get Richards to use her computer expertise to pull the records on Tracy Johnson’s computer. He knew how to use the machines for day-to-day tasks, but that was as far as it went.

He switched Tracy’s on, but her files were password-protected and Frazier couldn’t tell him what it was, so he shut it down again.

Like everyone else to whom Dwight had spoken so far, Brandon Frazier claimed to know little about his colleague’s personal life.

“Hell, man—I don’t know if she even had a personal life, you know what I mean? Some of us were talking last night at Jerry’s, wondering if Tracy had anything going on the weekends or evenings. Nobody knew. I mean, she was friendly and all. She’d go out for drinks after work before she adopted Mei, but she was still in her new-mom mode.”

Something bitter in the tone of his voice made Dwight remember that Frazier and his wife had split a couple of months after the birth of their own baby. Too much attention to the baby on the wife’s part? Jealousy on his? His own wife had been like that when Cal was born, but by then he’d known the marriage was a mistake, so it didn’t matter to him that Jonna gave all her attention to their son. Took enough pressure off him that, for a while there, he thought they could make a go of it, that both of them loving Cal would make up for not loving each other.

“She’d talk about the baby,” Frazier said, “or if somebody brought up a television program or a basketball game she’d seen, she’d join in, but mostly it was about work.”

“Good-looking woman like her, you not married—y’all never hooked up?”

Frazier shrugged. “Wasn’t for me not trying. When I was still in private practice, she wouldn’t go out with me because it might be a conflict of interest, her prosecuting my clients, you know? And then when I came over here, she still wouldn’t go out with me. Said she wanted to keep her professional life separate from her personal. Well, she sure did that, didn’t she? She was a damn good prosecutor, though. I hope Doug finds somebody else right away because it’s going to be rough taking up her slack.”

“Who was tight with her here in the courthouse?” Dwight asked as he opened the desk drawers.

Frazier watched him poke through paper clips, rulers, pens, staples—the usual office supplies that clutter everyone’s desk. Except for an envelope of baby pictures, some cosmetics, a box of tampons, and a stash of foil-wrapped butterscotch candies, it could be his own desk.

“I don’t know that anybody was particularly tight with her, but I think she and Julie usually wound up eating lunch together most days when they were both in the building.”

Julie would be Julie Walsh, another ADA.

“Enemies?” asked Dwight, holding to the light a silver-framed picture of Mei in a little ruffled bathing suit and matching chartreuse sunglasses. He and Deborah had never discussed children. Did she want one of her own? For that matter, did he want another? He set the picture down gently. “We heard she got a death threat recently.”

Frazier obligingly looked up the name and present location of the prisoner who had recently threatened her and was now serving time at a prison farm in the next county.

“Nobody took him seriously, though. He was just pissed that Tracy gave the jury a solid case and wouldn’t cut a deal.”

“What about Martha Hurst?” Dwight asked.

“Who?”

Dwight explained and Frazier just shook his head. “Sorry. I was still living in Tennessee back then.”

As Dwight opened the top files and began to scan through Tracy’s current workload, Frazier said, “What about her Palm Pilot?”

“Her what?” Dwight said absently, already absorbed in the case against some dumbass who had robbed a Wendy’s as one of his deputies was ordering a hamburger at the drive-through and then shot and wounded a customer.

“Her electronic scheduler and address book.”

“Oh, right. Y’all find it?”

“It’s not here at the office. Everybody says she carried it in her purse. She would’ve had it with her when she was killed.”

Sitting at her desk in the Colleton County Sheriff’s Department shortly before eleven this Sunday morning, Deputy Mayleen Richards looked over her notes for the briefing session Major Bryant had scheduled, and wished she had more to give him.

A tall and sturdily built woman who had just turned thirty-three, Richards had cinnamon brown hair and a prominent nose set in the middle of a face full of freckles. She had grown up on a tobacco farm near Makely, and after finishing a two-year course in computer programming at Colleton Community College, she had tried to sit at a desk in the Research Triangle, but the work was too sedentary for her muscular frame and she had hated the petty office politics. After six years of it, she abruptly quit, divorced the white-collar husband who was on a slow track to middle management, and talked Sheriff Bo Poole into hiring her to update the department’s computer system while she trained to become a sworn officer. Uniformed patrol was a step in the right direction, but the detective squad was her ultimate goal, and now that she had her chance, she wanted desperately to prove herself to Major Bryant.

Not for one single minute would Richards ever admit to having a crush on her boss, not even to herself. The only emotion she would consciously acknowledge was gratitude that he had approved her promotion to his command in October. All the same, he had delegated primary responsibility for uncovering details about Tracy Johnson’s personal life to her, and she was frustrated by how little there was to report.

Yesterday morning, Johnson’s brother and his wife had driven over from Widdington with a key to the house, a two-bedroom condo at the western edge of Dobbs. Dr. Johnson, a history professor at Eastern U., was several years older than his sister, and while the two were fond of each other, they hadn’t shared much in common beyond their parents, who were both long dead. “We usually got together for birthdays and holidays,” said Mrs. Johnson, “and we were always there for each other in emergencies, but you know how it is.”

Yes, the detectives were told, Dr. Johnson was executor of Tracy’s will and would have been Mei’s guardian, had the child survived. Tears glistened in the eyes of both when he said that. “We never had children either. She would have been more like a granddaughter than a niece.”

They wished they could say who might have wanted to kill Tracy, but they were clueless. “You’ll let us know when you’ve finished with the house?” asked Mrs. Johnson. “We’ll need to clean out the refrigerator before everything spoils.”

Mayleen Richards and her colleague, Detective Jack Jamison, spent the next few hours interviewing neighbors and searching the house. Unfortunately, it was not a Norman Rockwell development with block parties, potluck suppers, and neighbors running in and out of one another’s kitchens. Here on a Saturday morning, they were able to find a lot of people home. On the other hand, most of the residents were young professionals who worked and played in Raleigh and had little interest in cultivating close ties in a place where they didn’t expect to live more than four or five years before moving up to something larger. Johnson’s condo was an end unit, and the unit next door was owned by a retired doctor who had closed the place in November before leaving to spend the winter in Florida. The next nearest neighbors were childless workaholics, who claimed nothing beyond a nodding acquaintance.

A quick canvass of the street gave them three more who thought they might recognize Tracy if she had the baby with her, but the general response was either a blank stare or a momentary curiosity about the tragedy. “Oh, yeah, I saw that on the news this morning. You mean that was the woman who lives at one-thirty-eight? Jeez Louise! Who you think did it?”

The inside of the condo was only slightly more revealing. For starters, it was much tidier than Jamison would have expected for the home of a toddler, and it smelled of a woodsy air freshener augmented by the live Christmas tree that stood in front of the living room window. At the base of the slender tree were four or five brightly wrapped presents.

The two detectives pulled on latex gloves, and while Jamison searched the office area for the Palm Pilot Tracy Johnson was known to use, Richards went straight to the dead woman’s bedroom and bath.

Paydirt.

In the medicine cabinet, amid three different over-the-counter cold remedies for infants, were an opened packet of condoms and a wheel of birth control pills with five empty slots. Lace-trimmed teddies and satin thongs were in the lingerie drawer of a bedroom bureau, but utilitarian cotton briefs and simple, no-nonsense bras made up the bulk of Johnson’s underwear.

Mayleen Richards thought of her own lingerie drawer. Since her divorce, she hadn’t been in a relationship serious enough to warrant going out and buying new frills. Unbidden came an image of herself wearing peach-colored bra and panties and Major Bryant running his finger along the elastic waistband. She instantly flushed so hotly that her face was one large orange freckle when her guilty eyes looked back from the mirror above the bureau.

Where the dickens did that come from? she wondered, then flushed even deeper as she suddenly remembered the erotic dream she’d had last night. A dream that had left her wet and throbbing.

Major Bryant was going to marry Judge Knott week after next. She was going to a party in their honor tonight, for pete’s sake. Dreams were nothing, she told herself. Hell, she’d dreamed about half the guys in the department. All it meant was that her subconscious wanted a man in her life. Any man. Not necessarily Major Dwight Bryant, who was totally off-limits.

Giving herself a mental shake, she willed herself to forget about dreams and focus on reality.

Indications were good that Johnson was probably sexually involved with someone, but the bathroom was spotless. Ditto the rest of the condo. The hamper was empty and folded laundry lay in neat piles on the washer. Fresh towels hung on the racks, clean sheets were on the bed, and the tracks of a vacuum cleaner could be seen on all the carpets. On the kitchen counter was a note: “You need more bleach and scouring powder.”

The evidence was unmistakable. “Her cleaning woman must have been here yesterday,” she told Jamison.

“No Palm Pilot or Rolodex on her desk or in the drawers,” Jamison reported. “You want to check out her computer?”

“Sure.”

Easier said than done. Richards pressed the power button and nothing happened. No lights, no familiar hum. She pulled out the CPU tower from beneath the desk. Well, there was the problem. It wasn’t plugged in. The cover felt loose to her, though, and it needed only a slight tug to come off because the screws were right there on the floor. She took one look and realized that the inside had been gutted. Everything that made this personal computer personal was gone.

“Damn!” she said. She would process the CPU inside and out for prints, but whoever did this was not only savvy enough to know that deleted data could be retrieved but had probably worn gloves, too. “Damn, damn, damn!” she swore again.

“What?” asked Jamison.

When she told him, they checked the entrances and discovered that someone had simply shoved through the flimsy lock on the back door, ripping the keeper from the doorjamb, and then had pushed the keeper back into place so that the break-in would not be immediately noticed.

“Clean, neat job,” Richards said. No smudges, no visible shoe tracks across the recently mopped kitchen floor. When they dusted for prints, it was as they pessimistically expected: nada.

They continued searching.

In the entry closet, stuck down behind some coats and scarves, Jamison came across a box with a baby doll, doll carriage, and some stuffed animals, a box very similar to the one in a closet in his own house except that his box held little-boy toys.

“It’s the baby’s Santa Claus presents,” he said sadly.

In the end, the only thing they had found with immediate possibilities was a short list of phone numbers posted by the kitchen phone.

Back in the office that afternoon, Mayleen Richards dialed the first number on that list—“Dr. T”—and listened to a recorded message from Mei Johnson’s pediatrician’s office. She jotted down the name of the practice and found it listed in the phone book. First thing Monday morning, she’d check out this Dr. Trogden. See what he could add.

Second on the list was Johnson’s own number in the DA’s office, followed by young Mei’s daycare center and two women, who said, when called, that they occasionally babysat for Ms. Johnson.

“What?” shrieked Nettie Surles, who answered a Makely number. “The baby’s dead? That’s impossible! They were just here.”

“When?” asked Richards.

“Friday afternoon. Little Mei had an ear infection so she couldn’t go to daycare. Tracy dropped her off here in the morning and then came back for her that afternoon after she finished in court. Babies don’t die from an ear infection. Not in this day and age. Who did you say you were? What happened?”

Richards explained as gently as she could and heard the woman begin to cry. She took down Mrs. Surles’s address and asked if she could be interviewed the next morning.

“Well, now, I do go to church at ten . . .”

They agreed on nine o’clock and Richards dialed the next number.

“Such a shame,” said Marsha Frye, who lived there in Dobbs, only minutes away from Tracy Johnson’s condo. “She was a nice woman and the baby was just precious. Who could imagine such a thing happening to them?”

She readily agreed to an interview, “but could you come now? The children are about to have their afternoon snacks.”

When Mayleen Richards drove out to the Frye home, Marsha Frye proved to be a young woman about her own age, with a warm and easygoing temperament. The house was a fifties-style brick ranch and was now surrounded by mature trees and overgrown foundation plantings. Inside, the living room was almost bare of furniture except for a shabby couch, shelves jammed with picture books, plastic bins full of toys, and a couple of low tables and small chairs. Colorful fingerpainted pictures of Christmas trees were thumbtacked to the plasterboard walls, and drying on a windowsill were a dozen or more sweetgum balls and English walnuts that had been dipped in silver or gold paint and tied with red ribbons, ready to hang on a real tree.

Four small tots, each holding a sippy cup of juice, lounged on the couch watching a Frosty the Snowman video.

“The three blondies are mine,” she told Richards. “Triplets. Three years old in February. We childproofed the house and turned this room into a playroom. I figure two more years, then they’re off to kindergarten, we redo the place, and I get my life back.”

“And you babysit for others, too?”

“Four or five aren’t much more trouble than three,” Marsha Frye assured her. “But I didn’t take Mei on a regular basis. I’ve kept her overnight once in a while when Tracy had to be out of town, but normally Mei goes to a daycare center near the courthouse. I was just the backup when Tracy had to work late or when Mei was sick. I’m a registered nurse and I can tend a sick baby without infecting the others.”

“She was sick Friday,” said Richards.

“I know. I kept her Thursday because she was just starting with her earache again. But Tracy has—I’m sorry, had someone down in Makely for when she worked there. Nettie somebody-or-other. I’m afraid I don’t know her full name.”

“Nettie Surles?”

“That’s probably it,” Mrs. Frye said. “I do have the daycare number, if you need it.”

But when Richards pressed her for more information about Tracy Johnson, Marsha Frye had shrugged her shoulders helplessly. “I’m sorry. It was pretty much a business arrangement, not a personal friendship. I haven’t had time to make new friends since the triplets came, and she wasn’t one for a lot of small talk either. The kids keep me on the run. I know she was an assistant district attorney and I gather that she liked her work and I also know she was crazy about Mei. Just the way she smiled when she came to pick her up.”

One of the sippy cups hit the floor with a thump.

“Mama, can we have more crackers?”

“And I want more juice.”

“I hate this stupid Frosty,” said the dark-haired child from the end of the couch. Can’t we watch Harry Potter?”

“How do we ask?” Mrs. Frye said automatically.

“Pleeease!” came the chorus in four-part bedlam.

“Sorry,” Mrs. Frye said to Richards.

“That’s okay,” said the deputy. “I can see myself out.”

Until this Sunday morning, Jack Jamison had attended only three autopsies since his promotion to full-time detective, and all three had been on middle-aged men with whom he’d had no personal connection. The first time, he had expected to be queasy and was modestly proud of himself when the experience proved no more gory than the hog-killings he helped with every winter after the weather turned cold enough to slaughter and process the meat before it could spoil. Once a chest and belly are sliced open, entrails are entrails, whether human or pig.

The third one, a victim who hadn’t been found until at least a week after his death, was pretty bad, but the smell of rotting flesh is part of farm life, too, where dogs and possums occasionally crawl up under a house or barn to die and have to be fished out piece by piece.

Disgusting, but bearable.

Today’s session was the roughest yet, though. This was the first woman and the first time he had actually known the victim. He had briefed her about an ongoing investigation just last Wednesday. He had even held the baby girl once, a gurgling little charmer who was only a few months older than his own son. Now her tiny form lay on the next gurney, a small still mound that barely lifted the sheet. And no matter how much he told himself that the baby was beyond any pain or suffering, he’d nevertheless had to look away when those first cuts were made with scalpel and electric saw.

“No surprises here,” the ME had said. “Blunt trauma to the head, resulting in intercranial hemorrhage and transtentorial herniation.”

Now Jamison stood impassively as the ME finished his external examination of Tracy Johnson’s naked body and then nodded to the diener, whose job it was to open her up.

The daycare center had proved just as fruitless as the interview with Marsha Frye, and Mayleen Richards’s Sunday morning drive to interview Nettie Surles down in Makely had not added much more.

Mrs. Surles was slightly hard of hearing, but it was clear that Tracy Johnson had entrusted Mei to her care because she looked like everybody’s dream grandmother: white hair, merry eyes, a comfortable bosom made for cuddling babies, and a house that smelled of cinnamon and vanilla.

“Are you sure you won’t have another sugar cookie,” she urged Richards.

“No, ma’am, thank you.”

“I hope you’re not doing that no-carbs thing they keep talking about. I’m sure so much meat and fat can’t be healthy. These are just made from good pure sugar, flour, and butter. Couldn’t hurt a flea.”

“No, really,” Richards murmured. “I had a big breakfast.”

“Oh, that’s good. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. That’s what I always tell Tracy. You make sure that baby gets her milk and fruit and oatmeal and she’ll grow up healthy as a horse.”

The sudden memory that, no, little Mei was not going to grow up had Mrs. Surles in tears again.

Between sniffles, she described how Tracy had called her on Friday morning. Mei had an earache. The doctor could see them late that afternoon if Tracy could get there before five, so could Mrs. Surles look after her that day? That way Tracy could drive straight to Raleigh without having to swing over to Dobbs to pick up Mei.

“She gave me pain syrup for the baby, and after she was gone I put some warm sweet oil in Mei’s ear. I know it’s old-fashioned, but it does seem to help, and then I let her sleep on my heating pad. That’s what the poor little thing did most of the day. Just slept or watched television. Tracy came for her a little before four and bundled her up and took her out to the car. She cried when Tracy strapped her into the car seat. I know they save lives, but honestly! So uncomfortable for the little ones. Tracy said she’d probably go back to sleep the minute she started driving, but I can never help thinking they’d be better off if they could just stretch out across the seat the way my children used to do.”

Eventually, Richards worked the conversation around to Tracy Johnson’s personal life.

“Well, now, you know, I do think she might’ve had a fellow. Right before Halloween, she had on a pair of new earbobs. Not dimestore stuff either—real pretty gold and turquoise. Looked like Mexican or Southwest. Said a friend gave them to her and I said, ‘Friend? Or boyfriend?’ and the way she laughed, I could tell it was a boyfriend. ‘Just make sure he can love Mei as much as he says he loves you,’ I told her. ‘Oh, it’s nowhere close to that,’ she says. ‘Not yet anyhow.’”

“‘Not yet’?” asked Richards.

“‘Not yet,’” Nettie Surles said, giving a significant nod of her head.

Now, as the hands of the clock on the office wall edged closer to eleven, Mayleen Richards began thumbing through the bank records they had taken from Tracy Johnson’s desk. So far, the only thing of interest were checks made out to Johnson’s cleaning woman, and she sighed as she added that name to her notes.

Across the hall, Don Whitley, one of the department’s drug patrol, looked up from his own report at the sound of her sigh.

“Tough morning?” he asked sympathetically.

“Not really. Just coming up empty.” Richards crossed to stand in the open doorway of the deputies’ squad room and nodded to two uniformed officers who had just come from the magistrate’s office, where they had booked two DWIs.

Whitley was mid-thirties and an inch or so taller than her own five-eight. He wasn’t movie star handsome, but he did possess a certain boyish appeal and Richards found herself giving him a second look. He had come on to her when she joined the department until she made it clear she wasn’t interested. Now, though . . . ? She wondered if maybe she’d been too hasty. Whitley was pretty solid. He was taking courses this fall at the community college. Going for an associate degree in criminal justice.

Divorced, of course, and what else was new? More than half the people in the department had been divorced. The job was notoriously hard on marriages. The constantly changing shifts, the opportunities to fool around, the difficulty of leaving the work at work. Jack Jamison seemed to be handling it okay, but he’d only been married what? Two years?

So maybe Major Bryant’s second marriage wouldn’t last either.

Appalled by where her thoughts had once again strayed, Richards said, “Is Castleman around?”

Mike Castleman, also on the drug interdiction squad, had been one of the responding officers in Friday night’s crash.

“Comes on at four,” Whitley said.

“I wanted to ask him if he saw a Palm Pilot lying around at the scene Friday night.”

“You missing one?”

“Not me. We can’t find Tracy Johnson’s.”

“You know for a fact she had one?”

“That’s what they tell us in Woodall’s office. We haven’t found it yet. Sure will help if she interfaced it with her office computer.” She glanced across the room to the heavier of the uniforms. “Hey, Greene? Weren’t you one of the ROs Friday night?”

Tub Greene looked up from his paperwork. “Got there right behind Castleman.”

“You happen to see her Palm Pilot?”

“Sorry. A bunch of people were milling around, though. We took their names. Y’all contacted all of them yet?”

“Not yet.”

Whitley leaned back in his chair and Richards noticed the dark circles under his eyes and the thick textbook on his desk. Between shift work and college, he was probably carrying a killer schedule.

“What about her house?” he asked. “You check it out to see if she had a computer there?”

“Yeah, but somebody beat us to it. Pulled all the memory.”

“The hell you say!” he said, sitting upright. “When?”

Richards shrugged. “Probably sometime between when she left on Friday morning and when we got there yesterday morning.”

“Denning check it out?” he asked, referring to their crime scene specialist.

She shook her head and described the ease with which the break-in had occurred. “Didn’t seem worth calling him for a full workup.”

Don Whitley jerked his head toward Major Bryant’s office further along the hall. “He know about her computer yet?”

Before she could answer, she heard voices and turned to see Bryant and Jamison. Bryant gestured for her to join them and held the door of his office till she was inside, then took his chair behind the wide desk.

“So what do y’all have?” he asked.

Richards started to speak, but Jamison interrupted her.

“I just got back from Chapel Hill,” he said, his voice urgent with excitement. “The autopsy. She was pregnant, Major. The ME estimates about six weeks.”