Rituals of the Season

CHAPTER 26

I know not a more cruel situation than that when the heart is bestowed on one whom the judgment could not approve. I would impress on every young lady how much she may prove the best guardian of her own happiness.

Florence Hartley, The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette, 1873

Things got a little hectic after that.

Dwight met us at the courthouse door and sent the children home to his mother in a prowl car. Kayra and Nolan pulled up as they were getting into it and Mary Pat immediately clamored to stay. Kayra had often babysat Kate’s two, and they looked upon her as just another kid. If she could stay, why couldn’t they?

“Get in the car,” Dwight said mildly.

Mary Pat’s bottom lip was out, but she followed the boys into the backseat and even helped Jake with his seat-belt buckle.

Dwight leaned in at the open window. “This is Deputy Maynes. If you’re good, when you get outside of town, he’ll put on his blue lights and siren for you.”

As we walked down to Dwight’s office, he hit the high spots of his last three hours for me. I was stunned to hear that it was actually Mike Castleman who had killed Tracy and Mei and then staged a phony suicide for Don Whitley.

He didn’t give me time to dwell on it, though, because Bo Poole and Doug Woodall were waiting for Deenie Gates’s show-and-tell.

That her stepfather’s bloody shirt had been in her locker all these years astounded everyone, but, as Percy Denning later said, what better place to store it? “And thank God she put it in a paper bag rather than plastic. It got enough air to dry out instead of rotting or molding.”

The summer shirt was one issued by a local bakery to their deliverymen. It was a light gray cotton blend, and although at first it simply looked like a gory mess, Denning read it like a child’s primer and pointed out the sequence of details: “See this spurt of blood? That happened with the first blow to the head. This area here is splashback from when he was pounding the victim on the floor. Here’s where he wiped off his hands and here’s where he pulled out his shirttail and wiped down the bat.”

He folded it up lovingly. “It’s a petri dish of DNA. There’ll probably be hairs, and look at those beautiful sweat stains under the arms. If the guy’s a secreter, we’ll have him nailed six ways to Sunday.”

Doug Woodall wasn’t looking at all happy. He had prosecuted Martha Hurst originally and he was already thinking of how this was going to impact on his race for governor. A human witness could be mistaken or lying. A bloody shirt was irrefutable.

“Okay,” he said at last. “Maybe this is how it went down and maybe it isn’t, but how did the ME miss the time of death by two whole days?”

“I think I can answer that,” I said. “You still have Brix Junior’s files here, Dwight?”

He did and I pulled out the packet of photos taken in the trailer that Friday morning all those years ago. “Just this past week, I knew I wasn’t going to be out at the farm for a few days, so I turned down the thermostat when I left to save energy, and the place was chilly when I got back.” I turned to our two law students. “Kayra, you said the former neighbor told you and Nolan that one of the reasons they snooped around Martha Hurst’s trailer after they realized Roy’s car had been parked there for several days was because the air-conditioning unit wasn’t running even though the windows were closed and it was very hot that week.”

“Hey, that’s right!” said Nolan. “I bet Martha turned it off when she left for the beach.”

“But look at this picture,” I told them. It was as I’d remembered even though the significance hadn’t registered on me at the time. The picture was a close-up of a bloody dent in the wall. It was also a close-up of the light switch and the thermostat. “See? The lever’s been pushed down to its coldest setting.”

Percy Denning immediately caught the implications. “The blowflies would have started laying eggs on the body almost immediately,” he said. “If the trailer was warm—and without air-conditioning, those things heat up quick in the summer—you’d start seeing successive larval stages pretty quick.”

“But if the trailer then became cold?” Doug asked.

“If the ME was given the colder temperature as what the body had experienced since death, it would make it appear as if the maggots had begun growing sooner in order for that many stages to have developed, so that would push back the supposed time of death.”

Bo gave a long-suffering sigh of exasperation. “We didn’t have a crime scene van back then. Silas Lee Jones was the lead detective on this case. He’d have been one of the first ones out there, right behind the responding officers. And Silas Lee has never liked summer heat and humidity.”

“Shit!” said Doug.

To do Doug credit, he had learned from the mistakes of other DAs around the state. He did not stonewall, he did not try to cover it up. Once the DNA tests came back proving exactly what Percy Denning had postulated, Deenie Gates’s stepfather was arrested and Doug petitioned the governor for a stay of Martha Hurst’s execution and either an unconditional pardon or a new trial. He took full responsibility for the flawed evidence that had convicted her, although he took it in such a way that voters could assume that he was being noble and that his zeal for capital punishment had nothing to do with it. He even gave generous credit to Kayra and Nolan for their “selfless dedication to truth, thus proving yet again that there is no need to abolish the death penalty in North Carolina because the system does work.”

With an ADA, her child, and one of his own deputies murdered by another deputy, Bo Poole had a harder row to hoe, but he’s political to his toenails and the whole tragic episode with Mike Castleman was structured as an example of how rigorously the Colleton County Sheriff’s Department policed itself.

Buried somewhere near the bottom of the story was the announcement that Deputy Detective Silas Lee Jones would be retiring, effective January the first.