Rituals of the Season

CHAPTER 20

A phrase may, by the addition or omission of one word, or by the alteration of one punctuation mark, convey to the reader an entirely different idea from that intended by the writer.

Florence Hartley, The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette, 1873

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 15

Driving back to Dobbs after the autopsy, Dwight swung by the SBI facility on Old Garner Road. Security greeted him by name at the door and waved him past with only a perfunctory glance at his shield.

“Agent Wilson’s in his office, Major. Want me to buzz him?”

“That’s okay. I know where it is.”

He turned down the hall to Terry Wilson’s office and saw that Terry’s door wasn’t fully latched. As he pushed it open and stuck his head in, he found Terry and K.C. Massengill locked in each other’s arms. They jerked apart as the door nudged K.C.

Terry scowled at him. “Hey, don’t you know how to knock?”

“Not when the door’s open.” Dwight grinned. “What if I’d been your boss?”

K.C. smoothed her blond hair and tugged her sweater down around her shapely hips. “We were just saying good-bye.”

“That’s a lot of serious good-bye for somebody who only works two halls over,” Dwight observed.

“I have to go to Charlotte for a couple of days.”

“And don’t tell me you and Deborah don’t ever mess around in chambers,” said Terry, beginning their usual banter. “Even when she’s not going somewhere.”

But K.C. saw the weariness in his eyes and put out her hand to him. “I’m sorry about your deputy, Dwight.”

“Yeah,” said Terry. “That sucks, man. They sure it’s suicide?”

“I just came from his autopsy.”

“Bummer. This anything to do with Tracy Johnson’s shooting?”

“Probably.”

“Y’all talk. I’m gone,” K.C. said. “Don’t forget the cat food, hon, okay?”

“Gotcha,” said Terry. “Drive carefully.”

“Y’all have a cat?” Dwight asked when the door closed behind K.C.

“Part of the package. For some reason, every woman I fall for has a damn cat. Deborah was the only one didn’t. Probably why it didn’t work out for us.”

Dwight smiled at his sour tone. “Lucky for me.”

“You didn’t come by to talk about cats, though, did you?” Terry sat down behind his desk and gestured for Dwight to take a chair.

“Nope. Just tying off loose ends. Seeing if Tracy Johnson had any real reason to pursue this Hurst business so Bessie’s granddaughter’ll stop bird-dogging Deb’rah and me every night.”

“Well, ol’ son, I went through everything we have on it. I even read Scotty’s field notes. He might not’ve pushed as hard as you or me, but this is no Gell case, Dwight. Not a single person he interviewed saw Hurst alive after Saturday evening.”

“As he was leaving the trailer park, right?”

“Well, naw, he pawned a couple of rings belonged to his stepmother around four o’clock, then went next door to the Fliptop Grill for a couple of beers, caught the end of a Braves game, and left around six. That was the last anybody says they saw him till that anonymous call a week later.”

“Kayra persuaded an old woman who still lives there to admit it was the next-door neighbor who called it in. She also told them that the nosy neighbor didn’t notice his car parked in the bushes around back till long about Wednesday.”

“Anybody see him drive in?”

“The old lady says not.”

“That’s still in line with the prosecution. They argued that Martha came home that night, found him there, and just let him have it for stealing her rings.”

“And took off for the beach the next morning, leaving him there to rot in the August heat?”

“You’re not going to start expecting logic from the criminal mind at this late date, are you?”

“What can I tell you?” said Dwight. “I still believe in Santa Claus.”

When he got back to the courthouse and parked, Percy Denning, Mike Castleman, and Eddie Lloyd were crossing the street, heading out for lunch.

“We got lucky, Major,” said Denning. “Silas Lee found the slug that killed her.”

“Really?”

He hadn’t meant to sound so surprised, and the others grinned.

“I’ve already put it under the microscope,” Denning said. “It came from Whitley’s .44, all right.”

So that was that, thought Dwight as he continued on to his office. Whitley and Johnson and an affair that went sour. Because she was a snob like Deborah thought? Too concerned with class differences to be seen with him openly? Or did the baby she carried complicate things? They would probably never know. But at least it cleared Tracy’s murder off his plate, and if the citizenry would just behave themselves between now and next Wednesday, maybe he and Deborah could get married in peace.

As he approached his office, a uniformed officer passed him in the hall with an armload of brightly colored boxes and a “Joy to the World” smile on his face. “Toy drive’s picking up, Major!”

Every year the department collected toys for needy children, which reminded him that he still hadn’t shopped for Cal. He couldn’t decide between a dirt bike for the farm or a ten-speed for the town up in Virginia. His thoughts were interrupted by Mayleen Richards, who came down the hall with a yellow legal pad in her hand.

“Um, Major Bryant? I think you need to take a look at this.”

She laid the pad on his desk, the pages curled back on themselves to show a page six or eight sheets down. “We found this at Ms. Johnson’s house. That’s her handwriting.”

He studied the figures with a sinking heart. “Shit!”

“Yes, sir.”

“Okay, Richards. I’ll take it from here,” he said.

She hesitated, then accepted the dismissal.

Dwight lifted his phone and called the DA’s number. “Miss Helen? Dwight Bryant. Is Mr. Woodall in the courthouse today?”

“Sorry, honey,” came the voice of Doug Woodall’s longtime secretary. “He’s in superior court in Makely. Won’t be in till tomorrow morning.”

“Do you know if the Ruiz trial’s still on the calendar for tomorrow?”

“Well, such as it is without that deputy that went and killed himself. Brandon Frazier’s going to handle it best he can, but just between you and me and the doorknob, honey, that guy’s gonna walk.”

Dwight read over Tracy’s notes again. “Time served?” she’d written. Sure looked like she was getting ready to cut a deal with this Danno R. He was evidently claiming that he’d had twelve packets of drugs and a hundred twenty thousand in cash when Don Whitley stopped him. By the time it got to the property clerk, the twelve packets had dwindled to ten and the cash was down to eighty thou. If he was reading her notes correctly, she was willing to deal; to let Ruiz off with time served if he could prove that Don Whitley had skimmed his stash. Which the guy would no doubt be able to do. Civilians were always surprised to hear how often drug runners gave one another countersigned receipts—so many grams received, so much cash to make more buys—like a handshake ought to mean more in that world than it did in the straight world these days.

“12 pkts (1 gm ea) > 10”?

He called the DA’s office and got Brandon Frazier, who told him that the drug found in Ruiz’s car was cocaine. “Why?”

“No reason. Just doing some paperwork over here,” Dwight said, unwilling to let the word out about Whitley just yet.

Had his deputy been a user or had he been dealing on the side himself?

He called the ME’s office, and after the phone rang six times for the doctor doing Whitley’s autopsy, her voice mail kicked in. “Dwight Bryant here,” he said. “Do me a favor and run a tox screen on Whitley. See if he was doing coke.”

After that, he carried Tracy’s legal pad across the hall to show Bo Poole.

“He shot her with the gun he used on himself, but it wasn’t about love or sex,” he told his boss. “She was going to put him in prison.”

“Whitley was dirty?” the sheriff asked.

“How else would you read her notes? It was his testimony that was going to put Ruiz away, so Ruiz decides to take a plea and turn it back on Whitley.”

“Then Tracy tells him what she has planned for him: ‘No more pattycake, buster, you’re going down.’ So he shoots her, hears she’s pregnant, then kills himself in remorse?”

Dwight nodded. “So what do you think, Bo? Do I try to make this Ruiz guy confirm what Tracy knew or do we just let the law play out in the courtroom tomorrow?”

“Either way, he was going to walk, right?”

“If he could help her build a case against Whitley, she was probably going to cut him loose. He’s been a guest in our jail since July. Five months. Almost what he’ll wind up serving if convicted.”

“Which Doug don’t think’s gonna happen if we believe all his pissing and moaning yesterday.” Poole leaned back in his chair. “You can talk with Ruiz, but what the hell’s the point? He’s not going to plead now that Tracy and Whitley are both dead. Not when he can walk out a free man tomorrow with no record. Any chance of recovering the money?”

“I doubt it. Jamison and Richards searched his place when they picked up his DNA samples. They flipped through his bank statements, but didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. I’ll have ’em take a closer look. They did find an expensive gold bracelet that he gave Tracy and she gave back to him. What happened to the rest of the money, though . . .” Dwight gave a palms-up shrug. “He told Castleman that money wouldn’t be a problem if he quit the department.”

“Oh, hell, let it go,” said Bo. “Even if you found a pot of cash sitting in his checking account, without Ruiz, you couldn’t prove he didn’t save it clipping grocery coupons out of the Ledger.”

Out at the hospital, Deenie Gates had positioned the folding yellow plastic board beside the door to the second-floor men’s room. It read, CAUTION—WET FLOOR, although she hadn’t yet begun to mop.

“Why you here wanting to know about Roy Hurst?” she asked, giving Kayra and Nolan deeply suspicious looks.

“Because Martha Hurst is about to be put to death for killing him, and we thought you might have remembered something after all these years,” they explained. “Something that could help her.”

“I don’t remember nothing.” The woman was so bone thin that her shoulder blades were sharply outlined beneath the dark red uniform shirt she wore, but she wielded the heavy mop and bucket with surprising strength. Kayra found it impossible to guess her age. There was no visible gray in her lanky brown hair, but from the wear and tear on her face, she could have been anywhere from thirty to sixty.

“Did you see him at all that Saturday?” Kayra persisted. “Y’all were together back then, right?”

“No.”

“We heard you were going to have his baby.”

“You heard wrong.”

“He didn’t get you pregnant?”

“You people cops or something?”

She sloshed her mop up and down in the bucket of disinfectant, then plopped it out on the tiles. Nolan had to step back smartly to avoid getting his sneakers wet as she pushed it back and forth.

“We’re not cops,” he said. “My mom was a friend of Martha’s. We heard she was your friend, too.”

“I got nothing against Martha,” said Deenie Gates, and her mouth tightened in a grim line. “But I don’t know nothing about her killing Roy and that’s all I got to say. I got work to do.”

Again the passive aggression of her dripping wet mop threatened their shoes and they retreated.

That afternoon, Dwight had Daniel Ruiz brought into an interrogation room. Ruiz was early thirties, with a chubby face and brown eyes that, at first glance, appeared sleepy and relaxed. It was only later that one noticed how wary and alert they were beneath those drooping eyelids. His English was good and, unlike other Latinos caught in this situation, he did not pretend he needed an interpreter. Nevertheless, for all the comprehension he showed to Dwight’s questions, Dwight might as well have been speaking Russian.

No, he hadn’t been offered a deal. How could there be a deal when he was innocent? Oh, and he was truly sorry to hear about the beautiful ADA’s death, but there had been no understanding between them.

Missing drugs and money? But he’d known nothing about the drugs and money in that car. It wasn’t even his car, merely one he was driving down to Florida as a personal favor to an elderly friend who was spending the winter there.

Don Whitley? Was that the officer who shot the lady DA? Sorry. He had been treated courteously by the officers who arrested and booked him, but they hadn’t exchanged business cards and he didn’t know their names.

“Yeah, right,” said Dwight and signaled to the bailiff to take Ruiz back to his cell.

He hadn’t been back in his own office ten minutes when Doug Woodall appeared in his doorway.

“I thought you were down in Makely.”

“Miss Helen said you called about the Ruiz case? I hope to hell you’ve got something we can use on that slick bastard.”

“Sorry,” said Dwight and told him about Whitley and the deal it appeared that Tracy was making with Ruiz. “Did you authorize it?”

“Hell, no! Not that I wouldn’t have if she’d asked me. A dirty officer’s worth ten Ruizes and you know it, Bryant. Damn!” Doug Woodall was far too political not to consider the lost enhancement for his tough-on-all-crime reputation.

“Well, well, well,” he said as he continued to put all the pieces together. “Little Tracy was fixing to grab herself some headlines, wasn’t she? Taking down a crooked officer? Puts her name right out there as the defender of truth, justice, and the American way.”

“Worked for you, didn’t it?” Dwight asked sardonically. “Getting the death penalty for a white woman?”

Doug grinned. “Martha Hurst? Hell yes. And if I decide not to run for DA next time, Tracy would’ve been nicely positioned for the job. Nobody else on my staff has her combination of smarts and ambition.”

“Maybe she planned to run next election no matter what you decided,” Dwight said.

Doug’s face relaxed into a confident smile. “She try that and I’d’ve had her for breakfast.”

“Yeah? Seems to me that prosecutorial misconduct’s as good an issue to run on as crooked officers skimming drug money. How’d you feel about her looking into the Hurst trial?”

“Didn’t bother me a bit. That was an open-and-shut case based on solid facts provided by this office and the SBI. She could look from now to election day and not find a damn thing.” But as he considered Tracy’s ulterior motives for questioning the Hurst trial, his indignation grew. “Well, damn! You think she was going to try to take me down?”

After Woodall left, Dwight called a meeting of the detective and drug interdiction squads and they exchanged reports of the day’s findings, from the slug that Jones had picked up this morning to the notes on Tracy Johnson’s legal pad.

“Hey, no fuckin’ way!” said Eddie Lloyd when told that Whitley had been pocketing cash and drugs from some of the stops. His brown eyes flashed angrily. “He kill her because she was going to dump him, that’s one thing. But kill her and the baby because one scumbag said he was dirty? Shit, Major. That don’t fly.”

Mike Castleman sat silently with the same sick look on his handsome face that he got every time he was forcibly reminded of little Mei’s death.

“Mike?”

“I never saw him take a dime, Major,” he said, but his eyes dropped almost immediately and Dwight knew what he was thinking, what they all were thinking.

Rivers of money flowed up and down the interstate. Whenever these three stopped a likely car, they’d call one of the others on patrol as backup. The goods were usually hidden in the trunk. While one officer moved on to search the front of the car, it would be so easy for someone like Whitley to slide a packet of drugs or bills into a breast pocket before sealing the briefcase or box that held all the cash, cash that wouldn’t actually be counted till it was turned in to the property clerk. Sooner or later, though, they’d be tripped up by a smartass like Daniel Ruiz, who was sharp enough to know that the DA’s office would turn him loose in a heartbeat if he could prove that he’d been skimmed by an officer. It had happened in other jurisdictions and only the most naive would think that it wouldn’t happen here, too.

They kicked it around another ten minutes, then Dwight said, “Okay. Jack, you and Mayleen go through his place one more time. See what you can find, then everybody turn in your reports. Let’s wrap this up today.”