Rituals of the Season

CHAPTER 24

Be assured of this—little can you know of the moral conduct of another; little is it desirable that you should know. But whenever improprieties are so flagrant as to be matters of conversation; when the good shun, and the pitying forbear to excuse; be assured some deeper cause than you can divine exists for the opprobrium.

Florence Hartley, The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette, 1873

MONDAY MORNING, DECEMBER 20

While Percy Denning worked inside the SUV, Dwight questioned the man, a Mr. Harper, himself.

“Do you remember what time it was on Friday?”

“Probably between four-fifteen and a quarter to five? Late afternoon, but not dark yet. I wasn’t paying attention to the time and I didn’t have the radio on. I was thinking about my mother. Remembering how hard she and my dad worked to get us all through school. The kind of thing you think about at a time like that. Your mother still young and healthy?”

Dwight nodded.

“Then you don’t know yet how it feels to think you might lose her.”

“Is she okay now?”

“Thanks be to God. They put in a pacemaker and she’s doing fine, all praise to His name.”

With his assistant’s camera documenting every stage of the search, it took Percy Denning less than fifteen minutes to find where the slug had ricocheted off a metal seat-belt buckle and buried itself in the upholstered rear seat.

“Weird,” he said, holding the little clear plastic evidence bag up to the sunlight, “but it sure does look like another .44. Let me go run it under my microscope.”

“We’ll be in my office,” said Dwight. “If you’ll step this way, Mr. Harper?”

“This isn’t going to take too long, is it? My wife wanted to go Christmas shopping this afternoon.”

“We just need to get your address and phone number and have your statement typed up,” Dwight assured him.

“Give me a keyboard and I’ll type it myself,” said the man. “I’m an insurance adjuster and I spend half my life typing up reports.”

Twenty minutes later, Denning walked into Dwight’s office.

“It’s a match, Major. And there’s a tiny, tiny fleck of dried blood. I don’t know if it’s enough for a DNA match, but I’ll send it in.” He hesitated.

“Something else, Denning?”

“I didn’t say anything Friday because it didn’t seem important, but Whitley’s liquor bottle . . .”

“What about it?”

“It might not mean a thing, but his were the only prints on the bottle.”

“So?”

“The only prints, Major.”

“Oh,” said Dwight in dawning comprehension. “No smears, no blurs?”

“No, sir.”

“I see. And Whitley’s prints?”

“One perfect set. It’s like he picked up this pristine bottle one time and never changed the position of his fingers.”

“So somebody got cute.”

“Not cute enough. That little strip of plastic off the cap that we found under the seat? There’s a partial thumbprint and it’s not Whitley’s. I don’t know if there’s enough to get a hit, but I’ll run it through AFIS.”

After Denning left, Dwight placed a call to Chapel Hill. As he hung up, Bo Poole came back from lunch and did an exaggerated double take upon seeing him behind the desk. “I thought I told you not to come back till you were married.”

“Sorry, Bo, but we’ve got a little problem.”

“Let me get this straight,” said the sheriff when Dwight finished explaining. “A bullet that was fired the same night Tracy Johnson died, a bullet that may have killed her if that’s her fleck of blood, wound up in a car headed to Georgia?”

“That’s right.”

“It’s from the same gun Don Whitley used to shoot himself Sunday night?”

“That’s what Denning says.”

“And the slug Silas Lee found on Wednesday morning? It’s from the same damn gun?”

“Denning says it wasn’t even messed up much, so it was easy to match it up.”

“Real convenient, won’t it?” said Bo. The faster his mind worked, the slower his folksy drawl. “Wanted to make sure we’d tie the gun to both deaths, didn’ he?”

Dwight nodded. “We’ve talked about how Tracy was backtracking on the Martha Hurst case and we all know that Silas Lee was in charge of that investigation. Tracy gets shot and when the metal detectors don’t turn up the slug right away, guess who just happens to finds it?”

“A little extra insurance,” said Bo. “Slick.”

“Not really,” Dwight said and told him about the extremely clean bourbon bottle. “No prints from the ABC clerk that sold it to him and bagged it up. None of Whitley’s prints when he took it out of the bag or put it in his car or picked it up more than once when he was working up the nerve to shoot himself. I just talked to the ME who did his autopsy. They found a huge amount of sleeping pills in his bloodstream.”

“In the bourbon?”

“Maybe. Denning’s going to check it.”

“How you want to handle it?” asked Bo when they had discussed all the probabilities.

“First I need to make one more phone call and then I thought I’d get the whole search team in here, see if any of them saw him plant the slug.”

Eddie Lloyd and Mike Castleman were out on the interstate, Silas Lee was in court upstairs, and both uniforms were on patrol. It took a good hour to call them all back in, and Dwight used that hour to put some pressure on Daniel Ruiz’s attorney, who blustered and squirmed and talked about client confidentiality and eventually told him what he needed to know.

“Let’s go into the conference room,” said Dwight when Mayleen Richards came to tell him they were all there. “Leave your guns out here.”

That startled them into uneasiness. Except for Denning, they were unaware of why they’d been summoned for this meeting, and they looked at one anther in puzzlement, but did as ordered, then filed into the conference room and took chairs around the table.

Richards remained standing by the open door with her own weapon visible.

Dwight quickly laid it out for them, beginning with the discovery of a third matching bullet less than two hours earlier. “Except that it appears to be the first one, the one that killed Tracy Johnson and caused the car crash that then killed her little girl. The third slug is what killed Don Whitley. The second one is the one that you found in the road bank, Jones.”

“Yeah,” said Sheriff Poole. “Want to tell us again exactly how that happened, Detective Jones?” His tone made a sarcasm out of Silas Lee’s title.

Jones might not have been the sharpest detective on the squad, but he was not a complete idiot either. “Hey, you saying I planted it? That I killed Whitley? That’s crazy! I wasn’t even the one that laid off that part of the grid.”

“Who was?” asked Dwight.

“It was Castleman. And he kept bugging me to go slower, be more careful.”

All eyes turned to Mike Castleman.

The deputy brushed back a black curl from his forehead and gave a deprecating smile. “Hey, now, guys. Wait just a damn minute here. Yeah, I may have gridded off where the trajectory could have gone, but Denning and Lloyd were the ones who figured out the perimeters.”

“But we didn’t work that part of the bank at all,” Denning said quietly. “Only you and Jones here.”

Silas Lee Jones was still working it out on his fingers. “One of us killed Ms. Johnson and then shot Whitley, too? Why?”

“Yeah, why?” asked Eddie Lloyd, leaning in on Castleman, his wiry body as tight as a coiled spring.

“Not you, too, Eddie? Why would I shoot him?” said Castleman. “We were partners, friends.”

“And it’s because you were friends that you could get him to meet you at Ryder Creek after you read that e-mail he sent you Sunday night,” Dwight said inexorably. “That wasn’t a suicide note. That was a heads-up from a colleague who was going to turn you in. What’d you do? Tell him you could show him proof that it was Lloyd who was dirty and that he was the one shot Tracy?”

Castleman’s handsome face had gone pasty.

“You were in court with her that morning. Something she said about Ruiz must have tipped you off that there was a deal in the works and what it was. You heard her say she was driving back early, so you waited out there on the interstate for her, shot her, and then pretended you were on a regular patrol. Immediately after the crash, her cell phone was seen in its holder, yet by the time Denning got there, it had disappeared. It and her Palm Pilot, too. And you were first officer on the scene.”

“You were skimming the take?” Eddie Lloyd exclaimed.

Dwight nodded. “I talked to Ruiz’s defense attorney. We thought it was Whitley he was going to finger. It wasn’t. It was you, Castleman.”

“No!” Mike Castleman stood up so abruptly that Richards’s hand went for her gun as his chair crashed to the floor behind him.

“I’m a father.” He looked at them beseechingly. “I have a daughter. I wouldn’t have killed a little girl. I wouldn’t. I couldn’t.”

“Maybe not if you’d known she was in the car,” Dwight said. “That’s what you said at Jerry’s Sunday night. You didn’t notice the car seat. You were concentrating on the driver.”

“Michael Castleman,” said Bo Poole, “you’re under arrest for the murders of Tracy Johnson, Mei Johnson, and Donald Whitley.”

As they slipped the handcuffs on, Dwight motioned to Richards. “You and Jamison. Get a search warrant and turn his place inside out. Look for her cell phone and Palm Pilot and find out what he did with the money.”

“We’ll look,” said Richards, “but I bet he was using it to pay his daughter’s tuition. And he said he was getting her a new car for Christmas.”

Dwight reached for his phone and dialed Deborah’s number. When she answered, he said, “Ready to go home?”

“I’m at the hospital,” she told him.

“Huh?”

“It’s okay. Nobody’s hurt, but see if you can find Kayra and Nolan and tell them to meet us in your office. His mother was right. Martha Hurst didn’t kill her stepson.”

“What’s the matter?” asked Bo, who’d been watching his face. “She’s not leaving you at the altar, is she?”