Storm Track

* * *

I sat juvenile court that morning—emancipation, termination of parental rights, even a post-termination review, where I learned that two badly neglected twin brothers had been adopted into a loving family. In fact, the new parents were there with the babies, who were clearly thriving. Seeing your decisions vindicated like that is one of the happier aspects of being a judge.

In the afternoon, it was domestic court. There were the usual no-shows and requests for delays, along with a couple of unexpected meetings of minds that only required my signature rather than a formal hearing. By three o’clock, I was down to the final item on the day’s docket.

Jason Bullock was scheduled to argue a domestic case in front of me that afternoon—contested divorces seemed to be turning into his specialty, and, under the circumstances, I would have granted a delay. But the plaintiff, one Angela Guthrie, wanted to be done with it and was willing to let Portland Brewer, one of Bullock’s senior associates, represent her since she clearly felt any judge in the land would side with her.

Daniel Guthrie was represented by Brandon Frazier, a lean and intense dark-haired man who was also one of the men linked to Lynn Bullock’s name. Frazier was about my age, divorced, no children. A lot of women around the courthouse, single and married, thought he was sexy-looking with those smoldering, deep-set eyes, but I’ve never much cared for hairy men. Not that I’ve ever seen his chest. Looking at the wiry black hair that covers the backs of his hands and wrists gives me a pretty good idea though.

It was the first time I’d seen Frazier since the murder, and if he was walking around with a load of guilt, it wasn’t immediately visible. But then it wouldn’t be, would it? Every good attorney—and Frazier’s pretty good—is an actor and a con man. He has to be able to sell snake oil to a licensed doctor and he does. Why? Because he can make the doctor believe that he himself believes in it—one honorable man to another.

The Guthries were both in their mid-thirties. They had a nine-year-old son and an eleven-year-old daughter. Mr. Guthrie looked somewhat familiar. I seemed to recall him sitting in the witness stand to testify, but for what? Something criminal? My memory was that he’d sat up resolutely and spoken confidently. Today, he had a half-sheepish, half-defiant look about him.

His wife was suing for a divorce from bed and board (which in North Carolina is basically a court-approved legal separation) on the grounds of mental and physical cruelty. She asked for retention of the marital home, custody of the two minor children, child support and post-separation support—what used to be called temporary alimony. Whatever Danny Guthrie had done to her, it was still a burr under her saddle. According to the papers before me, she’d filed her complaint almost a full month earlier, yet, as she took the stand, I could see that she was madder than hell and it was scorched-earth/sow-the-land-with-salt time.

My friend Portland led her through a recap of marital frictions, all the ordinary, but nonetheless irritating, things that finally drive a spouse to say “Enough!”—his disregard for her plans, his lack of involvement in their children’s school activities, his excessive drinking, his erratic work hours.

That was when I realized why Danny Guthrie looked familiar. He was a former K-9 officer with the Fayetteville Police Department, now working dogs for the Drug Enforcement Agency.

“And when did you realize that your differences were completely irreconcilable, Mrs. Guthrie?” asked Portland Avery.

“It was sometime after midnight, the seventh of August. Or more accurately, between the hours of one a.m. and five thirty-eight on the morning of August eighth,” Angela Guthrie answered crisply.

“That’s remarkably precise,” Portland said. “Would you elucidate?”

Green eyes flashing, Mrs. Guthrie described how her husband hadn’t come home from work that evening, despite their earlier agreement that they would get up at dawn the next morning and drive to the mountains for a family vacation.

“A vacation that was supposed to give us a chance to relax together and learn to be a family again,” said Mrs. Guthrie.

Instead, ol’ Danny and Duke didn’t come rolling in until well after midnight.

“Duke?” I asked.

“His dog. A Belgian Malinois.”

As a judge, I’ve attended impressive demonstrations of what Malinois can do for law enforcement agencies. They’re built like a sturdy, slightly smaller German shepherd and they’re intelligent enough to understand several different orders. According to their handlers though, they have to be carefully trained to control a natural tendency toward aggressiveness.

Upset and angry, Mrs. Guthrie had smelled the whiskey on her husband before he got halfway across the kitchen.

“What did you say or do at that point?” asked Portland.

“I was really frosted that he didn’t come home in time to help me get ready for the trip and now he was so drunk he wouldn’t want to get up till late. Plus he’d been too drunk to drive, so we’d have to go get his car before we could get started. I just let him have it with both barrels. I told him exactly what I thought of him and his adolescent behavior,” said Mrs. Guthrie, beginning to steam up all over again.

“And what did Mr. Guthrie say or do?”

“He never said a word. Just stood there swaying back and forth till I quit talking. That’s when he looked at Duke, pointed at me and said, ‘Guard!’ and then staggered off to bed.”

“What did you do next?”

“Nothing!” she howled, rigid with indignation. “Every time I tried to stand up, the damn dog started growling down deep in his chest. I sat there for four hours and thirty-eight minutes till my son came downstairs and I could send him back up to get Danny.”

The bailiff and a couple of attorneys on the side bench were shaking their heads and chuckling.

Okay, I’m not proud of myself. I snickered, too. As a feminist, I was appalled. But as someone who grew up with a houseful of raucous brothers and dogs (dogs that half the time showed more sense than the boys), the thought of that dog and this woman eyeing each other half the night? I’m sorry.

Danny Guthrie misjudged my laugh and when he took the stand to tell his side of the story, he’d regained most of the easy confidence I remembered. He seemed to think I was going to be one of the guys, in full sympathy with what he clearly considered a harmless little prank.

“I’m no alcoholic,” he said earnestly. “See, what happened was, our unit had just gotten a commendation for rounding up eight drug runners and we went out to celebrate. Yeah, I probably should’ve called her, but I didn’t realize how late it was. Then I got home and I was really stewed. All of a sudden, that vodka hit me like a ton of bricks and she wouldn’t shut up. All I wanted was to get away from her nagging tongue and go to bed. I honestly don’t remember telling Duke to guard her. And it’s not like he bit her or anything.”

“But would he have if she’d tried to leave the room?” I asked.

“Maybe not bite exactly, but he’d of done whatever it took to hold her there.”

“You’re an officer of the law,” I reminded him. “Didn’t it occur to you that your wife could have had you arrested for false imprisonment? That you could be sitting in jail for a hundred and twenty days?”

“It was just a joke!” he repeated. “She doesn’t have a sense of humor.”

“Well, in this case, I’m afraid I don’t either. What’s the difference between what you did and hiring a man with a gun to keep her sitting there? And what happens when it’s your weekend to have the children and you’ve been out celebrating? Would you have Duke guard them?”

Apprehensive of where I was going, Guthrie swore he never drank a drop when he was in charge of the children, that he would never put them in jeopardy.

When I asked Mrs. Guthrie the same question, she grudgingly admitted that he was, on the whole, a decent father. Not terribly attentive, but certainly never mean to them or physically abusive in any way.

In the end, despite an eloquent argument from Brandon Frazier, I granted the divorce from bed and board and gave Mrs. Guthrie most of what she was asking for.

* * *

The Colleton County Sheriff’s Department is located in the courthouse basement and as soon as I’d adjourned court and stashed my robe, I went downstairs to give Dwight the swim trunks he’d left at my house on Sunday and which I’d forgotten to give him when he was out yesterday.

The shifts had just changed and he sat at his desk in short sleeves, his tie loosened and his seersucker jacket hanging on the coatrack. Labor Day might be the official end of white shoes for women, but Dwight never puts away his summer clothes till the weather starts getting serious about colder temperatures.

“Any luck with that man in the room next to Lynn Bullock’s?” I asked idly. “The New Jersey license plate?”

We’ve known each other for so long and he’s so used to me asking nosy questions about things that are technically none of my business that half the time he’ll just go ahead and answer.

“Connecticut,” he said now, distracted by a report he was reading. “No help at all. Turns out the guy’s a sales rep for a drug company, on his way home from a sales conference in Florida. Got in around ten, left the next morning before nine. Says he didn’t see or hear anything and probably didn’t.”

Dwight signed the paper he was reading, closed the folder, tossed it into his out-basket, then leaned back in his chair and propped his big feet on the edge of his desk.

“We got the ME’s report. He says Lynn Bullock bought the farm sometime between five and eight, although we know she called her husband at five and someone called her at five-ten. That means she was dead before Connecticut ever checked in.”

“What about John Claude’s pens? Reid and Sherry show you theirs?”

“Yeah. But the store had five to start with. I’ve got Mayleen Richards working on it.”

“There must be hundreds of them like that around,” I speculated.

“Not as many as you’d think.” He gestured toward the yellow legal pad that lay just beyond his reach. It was covered with doodles and notes that he’d taken when Deputy Richards gave her report. “The national distributor swears that he imported a hundred and fifty and only five of those were sent to this area. ’Course, the way people are moving in from all over, who knows? The whole hundred and fifty could’ve worked their way back east by now.”

I smiled. “Good thing we still had ours.”

“Good for Reid, anyhow.”

Even though I hadn’t really been worried about my cousin, I did feel a little relieved that the pen wasn’t his.

“You’re just going through the motions,” I said. “You know you don’t think Reid could do a thing like that.”

“I quit saying what a person could or couldn’t do a long time ago.”

Dwight’s only a few years older, but sometimes he acts as if those years confer a superior insight into human motivations. He gave a big yawn, stretched full length, then sat upright and opened another folder. “If we don’t get a viable suspect in the next twenty-four hours though, I’m going to start looking at all her old boyfriends a little closer. Millard King says he was jogging. Brandon Frazier says he went fishing. Alone. And Reid didn’t get to the ball field till after six. Remember?”

I wondered whose reputation would go in the toilet if Reid had to tell what bed he’d been in that afternoon.

Speak of the devil and up he jumps.

Thunder rumbled overhead and rain sprinkled the sidewalks as I hurried toward the parking lot before the heavens opened all the way and drenched my dark red rayon blouse. It isn’t that I mind the wet so much, but that particular blouse starts to shrink the minute water touches it—rather like the wicked witch when Dorothy empties the water bucket on her—and I was supposed to attend an official function that evening.

I slid into my car just as the rain started in earnest and there was Reid’s car parked by mine, nose to tail, so that we were facing each other. Reid powered down his window. With the rain slanting into his window instead of mine, I did the same.

“Feel like going to Steve’s for supper?” he said.

“Not particularly.”

My cousin Steve runs a barbecue house down Highway 48, a little ways past the farm, and it’s the best barbecue in Colleton County, but I was pigged out at the moment. During election season, that’s all they seem to serve at fund-raisers. “Why?”

“No reason. Just thought it might be fun to go by for the singing. Y’all still do that every week?”

“Yes, but that’s on Wednesdays.”

I almost had to smile. My brothers and cousins and anybody else that’s interested get together informally at Steve’s after Wednesday night choir practice or prayer meeting to sing and play bluegrass and gospel. It’s so country and Reid’s so town. He doesn’t play an instrument, he doesn’t know the words and he’s never dropped in when we were jamming except by accident.

“Well, maybe tomorrow night then?”

Rain pelted his face. His tan shirt and brown-striped tie were getting wet, yet he didn’t raise his window as he waited for my answer.

It was after five o’clock and I had plans for the evening, so I quit trying to figure out what he really wanted and said, “Sure.”

Maybe he’d hit me with it before I had to watch him make a fool of himself at Steve’s.

* * *