Rituals of the Season

CHAPTER 15

Never question the veracity of any statement made in general conversation.

Florence Hartley, The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette, 1873

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 14

When Mayleen Richards walked into the DA’s suite of offices that morning, she learned that an SBI agent had been there the afternoon before and that Tracy Johnson’s CPU tower was now at their Garner facility, undergoing a full lobotomy. Officially, the two agencies were cooperating fully, but Richards was competitive enough to want the Colleton County Sheriff’s Department to get credit for bringing the killer to justice. And if she could be the one to actually crack the case, all the better. It would prove to Major Bryant that he’d been right in keeping her on the job.

“Not to worry,” said Julie Walsh, who had blown in right behind her with an ornate Christmas wreath on her arm. Pink-cheeked from the icy December wind that whipped through the open parking lot on the north side of the courthouse, the young ADA hung her red wool coat and plaid scarf on the office coatrack and gave the detective a reassuring smile as she positioned the wreath on the wall above her desk, where its silver tinsel glittered with every stray current of air from the heating vents below. “Tracy was a suspenders-and-belt person. She backed up everything.”

“Yeah, I noticed her box of floppies,” Richards said glumly, looking at a now empty space on the desk, “but they must have taken those, too.”

“I’m not talking about computer backups.” Walsh opened the bottom two drawers of a four-drawer gray metal file cabinet that separated her desk from her murdered colleague’s. “These were Tracy’s. She preferred paper to a screen whenever she worked on something complicated.”

“You show these to the state agents?”

“I wasn’t here and I don’t think they asked any of the others.”

Richards quickly scanned the tabs on the manila folders tucked neatly into hanging files and pulled out random sheets. They seemed to be the personal notes and worksheets from past cases that Tracy Johnson had prosecuted during her time with Doug Woodall. The clerk of court’s office said that Johnson had borrowed the trial documents on Martha Hurst, but she did not appear to have filed any notes on it here.

“What about her current cases?”

“Mr. Woodall’s spreading them around to the rest of us till he can hire a replacement for her. Brandon Frazier and I are trying to reconstruct the game plan for a drug case coming up on Thursday, but if y’all can’t find Don Whitley . . .”

“Yeah, I know,” said Richards.

“Where you reckon he’s gone?”

“Dammit all, Sheriff,” said Doug Woodall.

The DA had found Dwight Bryant and Bowman Poole conferring in Poole’s office and he was out for blood, waving aside their genial invitation to pull up a chair and how about a cup of coffee?

“We’re pushing the limit now on the rules about speedy trials. Tracy already got three continuances and Judge O’Donnell says he won’t grant another. We don’t take this Ruiz to trial day after tomorrow, we’re going to have to cut him loose. Let him walk. It’s bad enough we have to proceed without her, but there’s no point even starting without that deputy. We don’t have him, we don’t have linkage. So where the hell is he?”

Sheriff Poole paused on his way to refill his mug from the carafe atop a corner bookcase and drew himself up to his full five foot seven. Despite their difference in height, he somehow managed to make the taller man feel two inches shorter.

“You think we’re waiting for him to phone in, Mr. Woodall? We put out an APB on him yesterday. We talked to his mama over in Widdington. We’ve got somebody watching his place here in Dobbs and we’ve just sent someone over there to search it. You got a suggestion what else we need to be doing, let’s hear it.”

“Now, Bo, don’t get your back up,” the DA said placatingly. Bo Poole’s power base in the county was even stronger than his. Only a fool would alienate someone who could make the party give more than lip service when he ran for governor, and Doug Woodall was no fool. “I’m not trying to tell you how to do your job, but it’s sure playing hell with mine.”

“What about it, Dwight?” asked the sheriff. “What do the troopers say?”

“Wherever he is, he’s not driving one of our units,” said Dwight Bryant. “Ours are all accounted for. Nobody’s seen him since he drove off alone from Jerry’s night before last.”

He raised a nearly imperceptible eyebrow to Bo Poole, who nodded and fixed their visitor with a stern look. “Dwight’ll tell you what we’ve got, but it stays in this office for now,” he warned as he stirred sugar into his mug and returned to the swivel chair behind the wide desk. “Agreed?”

“Your call,” said Doug Woodall and leaned back against the doorjamb.

“Tracy Johnson was about six weeks pregnant,” Dwight said tersely. “We’re waiting on a DNA sample to see if Whitley’s the father.”

Woodall jerked upright. “The hell you say!”

“He was sucking down the beer at Jerry’s pretty heavy, and when Deb’rah heard he’d gone missing, she remembered he seemed pretty cut up about Tracy. She thinks it’s because they worked together on some recent cases and because Tracy had encouraged him to go for his associate degree.”

“She know Whitley was balling her?”

“Not from me, she doesn’t.”

Bo Poole grinned and Woodall said, “Oh yeah, right. She told me about y’all’s separation of powers.”

“Anyhow, we don’t know for a fact that he was. All we have are Tracy’s cell phone records that show they talked to each other at least once a day and sometimes more. Best we can tell, the personal calls started last spring. End of May. That’s when they spent a lot of time working together.”

“End of May?” Woodall frowned and they could almost see the calendar pages turning in his head. “Oh yeah, that’s when we went to trial on the Carson hit-and-run, right?”

“Right,” said Dwight. “Whitley’s testimony was key on that one, too. He was the arresting officer, the one who spotted the broken headlight before Carson could get off the interstate. When we first heard about Tracy Friday night, I did ask Deb’rah who she was with these days.”

“I thought you said she doesn’t know about Whitley.”

“She doesn’t. But Tracy dropped a hint that she was seeing somebody. Somebody she’d found—and I quote—right under her nose.”

Woodall walked over to the coffee urn. “Maybe I’ll take you up on that coffee now.”

He inspected the inside of the extra mug on the bookcase, blew a speck of dust out of it and filled it with steaming hot coffee, then set it on the front corner of Bo’s desk as he took one of the empty chairs.

“So you’re thinking Whitley shot her Friday night?”

“Not necessarily. He was on duty then, though,” Dwight said. “Supposedly working the south side of Makely, but there’s nothing to show where he actually was.”

“And his motive would be what? The baby?”

Dwight gave a palms-up gesture. “We’re not that far along.”

“What do the state guys say?”

“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 around 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.”

“I’ll try,” Richards promised.

“Terrible thing,” said the young doctor as he came around the desk to shake her hand. “Just terrible. But I don’t see how I can help you. Mei was a normally healthy little girl. I saw her for her one-year checkup and everything was fine then. I was to have seen her for an ear infection late Friday afternoon, but as you know . . .”

“Yes,” said Richards. “We were wondering if Ms. Johnson gave any indication when she called that she was worried about anything else.”

“No, but ask my nurse. She took that call and then called back later after she checked my schedule and saw that we could squeeze Mei in.”

“Sorry,” said the nurse, reading from her notes in little Mei’s file folder. “It really was a routine call. Ms. Johnson was upset that Mei was in pain, but that’s normal for conscientious mothers. They’d rather hurt themselves than see their kids hurting. She said she had to be in court until around four, so I suggested a mild pain reliever and told her to bring the child in as soon before five as she could. There was absolutely nothing out of the ordinary about that call.”

Struck by a sudden thought, Richards said, “Could you tell me who recommended Dr. Trogden to Ms. Johnson?”

The forms had two holes punched in the top margin and were held to the file by metal prongs that folded over each other. The nurse flipped to the bottom form that Tracy Johnson had filled out on Mei’s first office visit. “Here it is. Dr. Grace MacAdams recommended us.”

“MacAdams? She’s ob-gyn, isn’t she?”

“That’s right. Her office is two blocks further down Blue Ridge Road.”

“Sure,” Terry Wilson had said when Dwight called him around noon. “Come on over now and I’ll order another barbecue plate. You want potatoes or hushpuppies?”

“Neither. Just double slaw or string beans,” Dwight told him.

“Deborah got you on a diet already?”

Dwight laughed and said he’d be there in twenty minutes. When he walked into the SBI facility on Old Garner Road, Terry met him at the entrance and whisked him past security down to his office, where two foam clamshells were giving off the appetizing smell of hickory-smoked barbecue and fried cornbread.

“I told you no hushpuppies,” Dwight said.

“Think I don’t remember the last time you said that? You wound up eating half of mine.”

“Well, maybe just one,” said Dwight, uncapping the plastic cup of dark and sweet iced tea.

As they opened their lunches, they were joined by an agent nearing retirement age.

“Hey there, Bryant,” said Scott Underhill. He carried a bagel in one hand, a mug of coffee in the other, and a thick brown folder was tucked under one arm. “Terry tells me you got some questions about the Martha Hurst investigation?”

“Thank you for seeing me, Dr. MacAdams,” Mayleen Richards said.

Dr. Grace MacAdams was tall and gray-haired with a firm handclasp and a slightly confused expression on her thin face. “I’m afraid I’m not completely clear on whether or not doctor-patient confidentiality survives the murder of a patient. I’m told that lawyer-client confidentiality can be breached, but—”

“Don’t worry,” said Richards. “I didn’t bring a subpoena with me anyhow. This was spur of the moment. I was talking with the pediatric nurse where Ms. Johnson took Mei and she said you were the one that recommended him—Dr. Trogden.”

“Oh yes.” Dr. MacAdams wore no makeup, but her smile lit up her whole face. “His dad and I interned together. Lovely man. And so is his son.”

“Anyhow,” said Richards, “I was wondering if Ms. Johnson told you who the father of her baby was.”

“The father? I don’t understand. Mei was adopted from China. I don’t think she knew who the parents were.”

“No, I mean the baby she was carrying when she was shot.”

Dr. MacAdams was clearly shocked. “She was pregnant?”

“The medical examiner puts it at about six weeks.”

Sadness shadowed the doctor’s eyes. “Did she know?”

“We aren’t sure.”

“I warned her that condoms weren’t safe, but she was worried about the side effects of the pill.” Dr. MacAdams opened the file on her desk. “She had an appointment to be fitted with a IUD last week, but she called and canceled it. And she was due for her yearly Pap smear in January. That’s all I can tell you.”

“Do you think she would have kept the baby? Carried it to term?”

“I really don’t know, Deputy Richards, but she wasn’t a schoolgirl, was she? If she was planning an abortion, I think she’d have kept last week’s appointment, don’t you?”

“Okay,” said Denning as their shift ended. “Let’s call it a day. We can finish it up here tomorrow morning.”

“Maybe we ought to make just one more sweep around the outer perimeter?” Castleman suggested.

“Waste of frigging time,” Jones grumbled.

“Not if everybody’s careful,” Castleman said pointedly.

“You saying I’m not checking every friggin’ ping?” the older man snarled. Even though modern detectors are featherweights compared to the originals, and even though he’d switched off with the others through the day, his shoulders still ached from carrying it so long.

“Look,” said Denning, ever the peacemaker. “We’re all bushed and getting sloppy. Two hours in the morning when we’re fresh ought to do it.”

“But another half-hour—”

“Give it a rest, Castleman,” said Jones, perking up now that he was sure Denning was going to let them leave. “That damn slug’s probably in the side of a car headed for Florida.”

He spoke facetiously, but Denning glanced at Castleman in dawning surmise.

“Damned if that’s not the smartest thing he’s said all day,” Denning muttered.

“No way,” said Mike Castleman. “Somebody’s car got hit, they’d be right on the phone to us. No, that slug’s here. We’ve just got to find it.”

Nevertheless, every local news channel carried the same story that evening: “And this update on that shooting death of a Colleton County DA last Friday: the sheriff’s department has asked motorists to check their cars. If you or someone in your household drove south on the interstate between Dobbs and Makely around four o’clock last Friday, they’re asking you to look and see if there is a bullet hole or a spot of freshly chipped paint on the driver’s side of that car. If you find one, you should call the number you see at the bottom of your screen and report it.”