Rituals of the Season

CHAPTER 12

Say all that is necessary, in plain, distinct language, and say no more. State, in forcible words, every point that it is desirable for your correspondent to be made acquainted with, that your designs and prospects upon the subject may be perfectly well understood.

Florence Hartley, The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette, 1873

SUNDAY NIGHT, DECEMBER 12

On the drive home that night, their new swing lashed down in the back of his truck, Dwight said, “I really appreciate you not asking any questions back there about Tracy being pregnant.”

“Nice try,” Deborah told him, “but if you’re hoping to guilt me into not asking questions now that we’re alone, that mule won’t pull.”

He glanced across at her with an amused shake of his head. “You want to tell me again how we need to stay out of each other’s business?”

“C’mon, Dwight, be fair. We all knew Tracy. You can’t expect me to pretend I didn’t hear what Mayleen Richards said.”

“Yeah, well, first thing tomorrow morning, Richards and me, we’re gonna have a little come-to-Jesus talk,” he said grimly.

She laid a placating hand on his thigh. “Don’t be too rough on her, okay? It was partly my fault. I mean, you’re her boss and I’m your—your—”

“Yes, you are,” he said as she hesitated, searching for the right term.

She smiled in the glow of the dash lights. “Yes, I are what?”

“Mine,” he said simply.

It was still a thing of wonder that she was there beside him, that in ten days she was actually going to stand up in church before God and the world—not to mention her whole family—and promise to be with him forever. He had loved her and wanted her for more than half his lifetime and now here she was. In his life. In his truck. In his bed. As the warmth of her hand passed through the fabric of his trousers, he felt himself begin to harden. To neutralize the moment, he told her about Tracy’s autopsy.

“All the same,” he said, “Richards knows better than to give out information like that in an ongoing investigation, I don’t care who’s doing the asking. This is precisely why we don’t push the ME’s office to give us the written report right away.”

Next morning, Dwight found himself ramming home those same facts to Deputy Mayleen Richards, who stood before him contrite, apprehensive, and so humiliated that her face was a dull brick red from the hairline of her forehead all the way down her neck to her collar as he blasted her for last night’s indiscretion. “You know the first forty-eight hours are the most critical, and that the longer we can truthfully say we don’t have an official cause of death or any other findings, the better for developing leads. When it gets out that she was pregnant—and yeah, dammit, thanks to you, it’s probably all over the whole county by now—you think any man’s going to admit he even had a cup of coffee with her?”

“Sir, I don’t think any of our people will talk,” she said tremulously.

“You think not, huh? And what about their spouses or dates? You trusting enough to think they’re going to sit on something this juicy?”

“I— No, sir.”

Her eyes met his steadily. He’d give her points for that. And she didn’t make excuses or cry. More points.

“Okay, Richards. That’s it. Now get over to her computer and get me some names before the innards of that machine go missing, too.”

Her eyes widened. “I’m still on the case? You’re not going to bust me back to uniform?”

“If I was going to bust you over one screwup, you’d be sitting in a patrol car doing speed checks out on the bypass right now,” he told her. “Just don’t expect me to go this easy if you mess up again.”

“No, sir.”

Out in the squad room, Jack Jamison gave her a sympathetic look. “You okay?”

Her smile was radiant. “I’m fine.”

Raeford McLamb glanced up from his computer screen where he was checking pawnshop records for any of the items stolen in the past week’s break-ins and grinned at Jamison. “Getting married must be making him soft.”

“Oh, he took me to the woodshed, all right,” Richards assured them, “but he didn’t fire me.” She picked up a notepad from her desk and tucked it in the pocket of her black wool jacket. She never carried a purse if she could help it and all her jackets and slacks had as many pockets as a man’s suit. “Anybody wants me, I’ll be in the DA’s office.”

“While you’re there, ask them for her cell phone number,” said Jamison, turning back to the pile of paper in the box on his desk. “That wasn’t in the car either and I bet you a dozen Krispy Kreme doughnuts she had her boyfriend on speed dial. Oh, wait a minute. Never mind. Here’s her bill with the itemized calls.”

He pulled up a reverse directory on his computer screen and keyed in the first number. It was immediately identified as a daycare facility here in Dobbs.

Across the hall, Mike Castleman, with his hand over the mouthpiece of his phone, rolled his chair over to the doorway and said, “Y’all seen Whitley this morning? DA’s office is on the phone. He’s supposed to testify on Thursday, but he hasn’t shown up for the briefing and Woodall’s pissed.”

When the others shook their heads, he spoke into the mouthpiece: “Sorry, ma’am, but nobody’s seen him today. Did you try his pager? . . . Aw, now, Miss Helen, I wasn’t implying you’re dumb. No, ma’am. Honest. I was just trying to be helpful.”

He was still using all his considerable charm to placate Woodall’s testy secretary as Richards headed upstairs to the DA’s offices on the far side of the courthouse.

Minutes later, Dwight Bryant emerged from his office and nodded approvingly as Jamison explained that he was going down the list of the most frequently called numbers on Tracy Johnson’s phone bill and trying to put a name to each of them.

“I don’t have this month’s bill, but I’ll put in a request for it.”

“Where’s Jones?” Dwight asked. Deputy Silas Lee Jones was old and lazy and had never been worth a damn so far as he’d ever heard, but the man would do to check out bystanders at the crash site and see if anyone had picked up Tracy’s Palm Pilot.

“Must be with Whitley,” Raeford McLamb said, cracking wise. “He’s missing, too.”

“I’m sorry,” said Julie Walsh as she watched Mayleen Richards’s fingers flash across the keys of Tracy’s computer. “Whenever she had to give me her password, she’d change it as soon as she got back to the office.”

“She told you her passwords?”

“Sure. She’d call and have me pull up a file or something, but the next time, it’d be a different code.”

“Like what?” asked Richards, knowing that most people don’t bother to get too complicated.

“It was all to do with her daughter and numbers. Last time, I think it was M-E-I-six-eight-ten. Another time, it was one-two-three-four-M-E-I.”

A deceptively fragile-looking young white woman, Julie Walsh was eager to help, but she had not worked there long. She had passed the bar exam last spring and only joined the DA’s staff the past summer. “Tracy sort of mentored me here, but we weren’t real close. I mean, we ate lunch together if we were both here at the courthouse, but she was older and what with the baby and all . . .”

Her voice trailed off. She tucked a strand of light brown hair behind her ear. Beneath her watchband, a tendril of tattooed flowers encircled her wrist so daintily that it was almost unnoticeable. On this chilly day, she wore brown corduroy gauchos, high-heeled brown leather boots, a man-styled white shirt, and a bright yellow zip-front sweater. There was a simple gold stud in one earlobe, a cluster of small gold bells cascaded from the other.

“Boyfriends?” asked Richards.

“Well, there’s an attorney over in Widdington that I’ve gone out with a time or two, but—”

“Not you. Her.”

“Oh. Well, yes. I guess. Don’t ask me who, though, because she never talked to me about him, but I think they might’ve been having a fight because last Monday we came in and there was this jeweler’s box on her desk and when she opened it, it was a gold-and-turquoise bracelet that matched some earrings someone—maybe him?—gave her for her birthday in October. She went ballistic about it. I mean, if it’d been a dishwasher or something, I could understand. My dad gave my mom a dishwasher for one of their anniversaries and she didn’t speak to him for like six weeks. But this was jewelry, for pete’s sake. In her colors. She really liked turquoise, you know?”

“She got mad because he gave her jewelry?”

“Yeah.” Walsh grinned. “Maybe she really wanted a dishwasher.”

“Wait a minute. You said the box was here on her desk? How did it get here?”

The young ADA looked blank. “I never thought about that. It was just there. Gee. Somebody in our office?”

Richards could almost see her brain working as it ran through her colleagues here in the DA’s office.

“No, I don’t think so. Somebody would’ve said something. Maybe one of the attorneys in town? They’re in and out all the time.”

“I don’t suppose you noticed the box? What store it came from?”

“Sorry. It’s not like she passed it around. The only reason I saw it at all was because I was standing right here when she found it.”

Richards shoved a pad and pen toward her. “Can you draw what it looked like?”

“I don’t know.”

Hesitantly, Julie Walsh sketched a wide silver cuff. “And there were like little rectangles of turquoise spaced along the edge.” She indicated the stones with small dashes. “It might’ve had more but I didn’t get a good look. She barely looked at it herself before she snapped the lid closed again. She didn’t put it on then and I never saw her wearing it. Maybe she gave it back?”

All during this time, Richards had been trying variations of the previous passwords. She jotted down yet another sequence of numbers after M-E-I, keyed them in, hit the enter key, and suddenly an alphabetized directory of files filled the screen.

“Oh wow!” said Walsh. “You did it.”

Richards ran the cursor up and down the rows. She opened Johnson’s computerized address book and skimmed through it, but nothing leaped out at her. It read like the courthouse directory: names, addresses, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses of attorneys, ADAs, deputies, and highway patrol officers that she’d worked with. Richards’s own name was there. So was Major Bryant’s.

And Judge Knott’s.

Some of the names had personal data entered in the notes section—birthdays, children’s names, alternate phone numbers. Judge Knott’s had “marrying DB 12/22.”

Unbidden came the fresh memory of the way the two had looked at each other last night. Richards’s heart wrenched as she recalled the easy familiarity with which the judge had touched the major’s hair, had held his hand, had fitted herself into the crook of his arm as they left Jerry’s.

Nothing to do with you, she scolded herself silently and set the computer’s parameters to print out the whole address book, notes and all, then went back to scanning the folders.

In a file labeled “Medical,” she found the names and addresses of Johnson’s ob-gyn and Mei’s pediatrician along with a log of office visits, copayments, and reasons for the visits. Nothing unusual for either of them.

Nor was her e-mail account for this computer difficult to open. Again, all the messages seemed to pertain to her job here.

Going up one level, she discovered one more folder lurking among the system files. It was labeled “Personal.” To her dismay, it was protected by a different password and none of the MEI variations seemed to work.

“Maybe she used her own name,” suggested Julie Walsh, who had been watching over her shoulder.

Richards tried the usual combinations. Nothing.

Frustrated, she pushed back in the chair and looked up at the younger woman. “Did she ever mention Martha Hurst to you?”

“Not really. I heard her ask one of the clerks to pull the files on it, though.”

Nearing retirement, gray-haired, and carrying seventy pounds over what he’d weighed when he first joined the department right before Bo Poole got himself elected, Deputy Silas Lee Jones reflected that it was a fine howdy-do when you had to ask witnesses if they’d seen something you couldn’t rightly describe yourself.

Cell phones he understood, but Palm Pilots?

“What the hell’s a Palm Pilot?” he asked plaintively after Major Bryant tracked him down at the coffee machine and gave him the assignment.

Castleman and Jamison explained all the things one could do with it.

Jones gave a disgusted snort. “Sounds like more trouble than it’s worth,” he said as he dialed the first name on the list collected at the crash site Friday night.

“No,” said the witness. “I didn’t notice a Palm Pilot, just her cell phone. It was in a holder on the dash, right next to that poor woman’s head. Front end smashed to hell and gone and the light was still on in the charger.”

“Oh crap,” Jones said to the others. “One of those bastards stole her cell phone, too.”

The clerk was forty-four and fighting it. She was rail thin, her hair an artful strawberry blond, and her pink eye shadow matched the pink of the long-sleeved silk blouse she wore with formfitting black slacks and stacked shoes.

“Martha Hurst? Oh, yes. She asked me to pull the files last week. Some third-year law student at Eastern was reviewing the case for his law clinic.”

“You know his name?” asked Richards.

The clerk frowned in concentration. “Norman? Newton? No, that’s not right. Something like that, though.”

Richards sighed. Well, how many third-year law students at Eastern with a name like Norman or Newton could there be?

Jack Jamison stood to stretch his arms over his head and flex his shoulders after two hours hunched over the phone bills and his computer screen. Jones had finished talking to everyone who answered the phone and had gone out for a smoke. Jamison looked through the windows to the opposite squad room where Castleman labored over his own computer screen. He started to call to him, then vetoed the idea. Instead he gathered up the bills and notes he’d made and walked down to Major Bryant’s office. The door was ajar and when he cleared his throat, Bryant looked up.

“Talk to you a minute, sir?”

“Sure, Jack. What you got?”

“Well, it might not mean anything. I mean, there was a logical reason for them to talk, but this much?”

He laid Tracy Johnson’s cell phone bills on the desk before his boss and pointed to the lines he’d highlighted. “Look at the times, sir. Some of these calls are pretty late at night.”

At that moment, Bo Poole stuck his head in the door. “What’s up with Whitley? He’s not answering his pager and Doug Woodall’s all over my ass about him.”

“I’ll put out an APB right away,” said Dwight.

“APB?” The sheriff started to laugh, then realized Dwight wasn’t joking. “A little extreme, don’t you think? We don’t need to treat him like a criminal just because he flubbed a briefing.”

“Yeah, I think we do,” Dwight told him.

“Hey, Major?”

Mike Castleman spoke over Bo Poole’s shoulder. His jaw was clenched and his voice was tight.

“Later,” said Dwight.

“No, sir. I’m sorry, sir, but you need to come look at my computer right now.”

They followed him to his desk in the empty squad room.

“I was catching up on my messages and there’s one from Whitley.”

He moved the mouse, clicked it, and a message dated the night before appeared on the screen.

Sorry, pal, but I can’t do this anymore. Wish there was another solution, but there isn’t. Don

Grim-faced, Bo Poole turned to Dwight. “Do it,” he said. “Now.”