Storm Track dk-7

by Margaret Maron

  Only a total sloth would use a car for a one-mile round trip, but I’m a pitiful jogger and walking takes too long. So I half-walk, half-run and when I get back, all hot and sweaty, with Ledger newsprint smearing my hands because Linsey won’t change the presses over to smudgeless ink, I might as well jump in the pond and swim till I’m out of breath before I shower and shampoo my hair.

  Keep in mind that I am not a morning person. Before eight o’clock, all I really want is a reviving cup of coffee and a quiet moment to read the paper. Being forced to work out first thing is not my idea of how to start the day, although I have to admit that the new regime’s done wonders for my muscle tone.

  Some days, if I’m pressed for time, I do drive down, but I always feel so guilty that it takes the edge off the morning. You think it’s silly to equate walking with righteousness and driving with sin?

  Me, too.

  But my Southern Baptist upbringing is such that nine mornings out of ten will find me puffing down the long drive. Which is why I was standing in a clump of yellow coreopsis at the edge of the road reading about Lynn Bullock’s death when Dwight drove by around nine that morning and stopped to ask if I wanted a lift back to the house.

  “Sure,” I said, opening the passenger door of his cruiser. (Riding in someone else’s car doesn’t seem to bother my conscience.)

  I was wearing sneakers, a sports bra and denim shorts with no underpants because I planned to swim as soon as I got back and half the time I don’t bother with a suit.

  “So who killed the Bullock woman?” I asked. By then I’d scanned both papers and seen little new since both went to press before the victim’s identity had been announced.

  “Now you know I can’t talk to you about this.”

  “Sure you can,” I wheedled. “I don’t gossip—”

  He snorted at that.

  “I’ve never repeated anything you ever asked me to keep to myself,” I said indignantly, “and you know it.”

  “True.”

  “And homicide cases are never heard in district court, so it’s not as if you’re tainting a trial judge.”

  “Also true.” He gently braked and I felt the underside of the car scrape dirt as we eased over a patch where the tire ruts were deeper than the middle.

  “Well, then?”

  “You need to get Robert or Haywood to take a tractor blade to this drive again,” he said.

  “Dwight!”

  “Okay, okay. Not that there’s much to tell yet. Bullock gave me his sister-in-law’s number up in Roxboro, but she never answered her phone till this morning. Said she hadn’t talked to Mrs. Bullock since Tuesday night. Didn’t know anything about a trip to Danville this weekend. She herself spent the weekend with a sailor in Norfolk.”

  Dwight pulled into my yard and cut the engine when I invited him in for coffee. I’d turned on the coffeemaker just as I left for the papers and it was fresh and hot. I poured us each a mugful, toasted a couple of English muffins, added figs from Daddy’s bush and the last of the blueberries from Minnie and Seth’s and then carried the full tray out to the porch table. Dwight had switched on the paddle fan overhead and it stirred the air enough to make the difference between pleasant and uncomfortable.

  Hurricane Edouard was still dumping water on New England, but here in Colleton County the skies were bright blue with a few puffy clouds scattered overhead.

  We buttered our muffins and topped each bite with the fresh fruits.

  “Anybody see anything at the motel?”

  “We don’t have statements from all the help yet, but so far, nothing. That unit was the end one on the back side of the building and the trees and bushes back there are so thick that Sherman’s army could’ve camped for a week without anybody seeing ’em. The people in the nearby units checked out yesterday before the body was found and we’re trying to contact all of them. The O’Days run a clean business, but if someone wants to pay by cash, they don’t ask to see ID and that’s what happened with the guy in the next unit. Connecticut license plate. We’re just hoping he didn’t lie about his plate number.”

  “How’s Jason really taking it?” I asked, popping a plump and juicy blueberry against the roof of my mouth.

  “’Bout like you’d expect. Doesn’t know whether to be mad or sad. She was his wife, but she was screwing around on him.”

  “Any chance he could’ve done it?”

  We’re both cynical enough to put spouses at the top of any list of suspects.

  Dwight shrugged. “Always a chance. He seemed pretty shook when I told him last night. He was at the ball field when you and I got there and his car was in front of us all the way back to Cotton Grove. Of course, he could have got home, found something that told him where she really was, and roared back to Dobbs by ten-thirty. We’ll have to wait for the ME’s report. One good thing though—they ought to be able to pinpoint the time of death pretty close.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. The motel’s shorthanded right now since school started, so Tom and Marie were both working the weekend. He had a bowl of peanuts on the registration counter and she ate a few when she checked in. Tom thinks that was around four-thirty, quarter to five.”

  He didn’t have to draw me a picture. Depending on how far along digestion was, the ME should be able to bracket the time of death rather narrowly.

  “Tom had never met her, didn’t know who she was and he didn’t think twice when she paid cash in advance and gave him a phony name. Benton.”

  “Her maiden name,” I said.

  “Now how you know that?”

  “She was an LPN at the hospital. Amy and Will got here after you left yesterday.”

  That was enough. He knows Amy, knows where she works, knows how she picks up information and stores it like a squirrel laying up pecans for winter.

  “Amy says she played around.”

  “Any names?”

  “Not recent ones,” I hedged as I nibbled more blueberries.

  “Her sister swears she’d hung up her spurs and was walking the straight and narrow these days,” said Dwight, “but you wouldn’t know it from the way that room looked.”

  He took another swallow of coffee. “Anyhow, Tom O’Day says she knew exactly where she wanted to be. Asked for a ground-floor room in back, said she liked it quiet and didn’t want stairs. It was the last non-smoking room left on that side. According to the switchboard records, she made only one outgoing call on her room phone after she checked in. Around five.”

  “To her husband. I was sitting in front of Jason when he talked to her.”

  “And the switchboard says she received an incoming call about ten minutes after that, someone who asked if Lynn Benton had checked in yet.”

  “Male?”

  “The operator thinks so, but can’t swear to it. She also says somebody called around three o’clock asking the same thing and that it could’ve been the same person.”

  “Impatient lover just waiting to find out what room she was in before rushing over?”

  “Sounds like it, since he knew what name she was using.”

  “Nobody saw her at the drink machine? Filling her ice bucket? Letting strange men into her room?”

  “If they did, they’re not saying.”

  “I guess you’re pretty sure it was a man?”

  “Dressed like that? Or rather, undressed like that? And she was pretty well-built. Taller than you. Probably stronger, too. Nurses do a lot of lifting and pulling. It would’ve taken somebody just as strong.”

  “He could’ve caught her off-guard,” I said, picturing the scene. “He could’ve been undressing her, took off one of her stockings. Maybe trailed it along her neck.”

  My mind flinched from the rest of the scenario. Lynn Bullock had thought he was making love to her. Instead—

  Across the table from me, Dwight pulled a fig apart to reveal the soft fleshy interior and I wondered what he was thinking as he ate it. Ever look closely at a fig? It’s male on the outside
, explicitly female on the inside. Erotic as hell, but I doubt if Dwight notices.

  “We bagged her hands,” he said, “but if the killer came up from behind with that stocking and threw her down face-first, she may not’ve had time to do more than claw at the thing that was choking her. If that’s the case, we’ll only find her own DNA under her nails.”

  “Poor Jason Bullock.” I sighed and got up to fetch the coffeepot for refills.

  When I came back from the kitchen, Dwight was holding a couple of plastic evidence bags in such a way that his big hands concealed the contents.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “These really do stay confidential,” he warned me. “Ever see this before?”

  Inside the first plastic bag was the top part of a gold-toned tie tack. Less than half an inch wide, it was shaped like a tiny American flag.

  “Ambrose Daughtridge wears tie tacks,” I said. “And so does Millard King, but I never paid much attention to them.”

  “What about this, then? We found it under the victim’s body. For some reason, it makes me think of you. Why?”

  It was a silver ballpoint pen.

  “Because I had one just like it on my desk at the law firm,” I said promptly. “You must have seen it there. John Claude gave them as Christmas presents three or four years ago.”

  Mine was in a pencil cup by the telephone in my bedroom and I brought it out to show Dwight. “I don’t carry it in my purse because I’m afraid I’ll put it down somewhere and walk off without it.”

  Dwight smiled as he compared the two. He knows my theory that there are probably only about fourteen ballpoint pens in Colleton County and everybody keeps picking them up at one business counter and putting them down at another counter somewhere down the road.

  These pens were sterling silver—John Claude doesn’t give cheap presents—and were distinctively chased with tendrils of ivy that twined along the length of the barrel.

  “Any fingerprints?”

  “Just smudges. Who else got one besides you?”

  “I’m not sure. You’ll have to ask John Claude.” I didn’t like where this was going. “Reid got one and Sherry Cobb.”

  Sherry is the firm’s small, bossy office manager and Reid, of course, is the current generation’s Stephenson.

  Lees and Stephensons have been law partners since John Claude’s father (a cousin from my Lee side) began the firm with Reid’s grandfather (my great-grandfather) back in the early twenties. Southerners sometimes exaggerate the ties of kinship, yet family loyalties do exist and most of us will always give a cousin the benefit of doubt, even a first cousin once removed, as Reid was. His sexual development may have stopped when he was in junior high, but that doesn’t make him a killer.

  I didn’t care if Will and Amy had once seen them together, there was no way Reid could be involved in Lynn Bullock’s death, and I wasn’t going to offer him up as a candidate to Dwight.

  “I think John Claude bought them at a jewelry store at Crabtree Valley,” I said. “Dozens of them are probably floating around the Triangle.”

  “We’ll check,” Dwight said mildly. “Long as Reid has his, no problem, right?”

  I keep forgetting how well he knows me.

  CHAPTER | 8

  Ordinarily, men and women have enough to do in attending to their own affairs, expecting others, of course, to do the same, and consequently they pay small attention to what is going on around them.

  After Dwight left, I finished reading the paper. Polls showed Jesse Helms with his usual slim lead over Harvey Gantt in the senate race—what else was new?—and NASCAR champion Richard Petty was several points ahead of Elaine Marshall for Secretary of State, though that gap had closed a little since the last poll. Nothing to get our hopes up about though.

  The Ledger’s front-page story carried a studio portrait of Lynn Bullock. Even in black and white, her makeup looked overdone and her long blonde hair was definitely overteased. More Hollywood than Colleton County.

  (“Meow,” scolded my internal preacher.)

  Sheriff Bo Poole reported that his department was following up several important leads and he appealed to the public to come forward if anyone had seen Mrs. Bullock or anything suspicious at the Orchid Motel between five p.m. and midnight on Saturday.

  In true Ledger fashion, the story ended by listing Lynn Bullock’s survivors: her husband, Jason Bullock “of the home”; her sister, Lurleen Adams of Roxboro; her mother, Vara Fernandez of Fuquay-Varina; and her father, Cody Benton of Jacksonville, Florida.

  I was mildly bemused to see Dr. Jeremy Potts pictured at the bottom of the same page, along with another white-jacketed doctor. They flanked a piece of diagnostic equipment that was evidently state-of-the-art. The story was about the machine, not the doctors, so I turned to the sports pages to check out the softball pictures.

  Linsey’s new photographer might have been slow with names, but he was expert with the camera. White or black, all our faces were crisp and clear. I never push, but I do make sure I’m always on the front row. Every bit of public notice, no matter how tiny, has to help subliminally at the polling booth.

  Putting the plates and mugs Dwight and I had used in the dishwasher, I wiped down the countertops, then swept the kitchen and porch floor clean of crumbs and sand from last night. It’ll be next spring before my centipede grass is thick enough to make a difference with tracked-in sand. In the meantime, no matter how many doormats I scatter around, I live with the sound of grit underfoot. It’s almost as bad as a beach house.

  At Aunt Zell’s, I kept my two rooms picked up and I chipped in on her twice-a-month cleaning woman, but that was about the extent of my domestic labors. Now I’m doing it all myself and part of me is amused to watch the surfacing of a heretofore latent pleasure in housework, while the other part is horrified to see myself slipping into such a stereotypical gender role.

  “Long as you don’t start crocheting potholders or make people take off their shoes before they come in,” soothes my mental pragmatist.

  By noon I had changed the linens on my bed and had just thrown sheets and towels in the washer when my friend Dixie called from High Point. She said she’d get me a visitor’s badge if I wanted to come over at the end of next month’s wholesale furniture market to pick up a few floor samples at dirt-cheap prices.

  “Should I keep my eye out for anything in particular?” she offered.

  Standing in the middle of my house and looking around at all the bare spots that surrounded a handful of shabby family castoffs, I hardly knew where to start. “A couch?” I said. “And maybe a really great coffee table? That’s all I can afford right now.”

  We talked about styles and colors and whether her love life was as stalled as mine seemed to be at the moment.

  Yet, as if to give lie to all my grumbling, the phone rang the instant I hung up and it was Kidd, who did a lot of grumbling on his own about having to work time and a half to compensate for his wounded colleague when he’d rather be upstate with me.

  “Tell me what you’re wearing,” he said.

  “Right this minute?”

  “Right this minute.”

  I slipped off my sneakers and curled up on the old overstuffed couch handed down from April’s aunt. “My purple knit bra and a pair of cutoffs.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Hey, I’m decent.”

  “Not for long.”

  I smiled. “Why not?”

  “Because I’m sliding the straps down off your shoulders and over your arms.”

  “You are?”

  “I am.”

  “And I’m letting you?”

  “You have no choice,” he teased. “The straps are keeping your arms pinned to your side while I pull the bra down around your waist and kiss you all over.”

  “Um-m-m,” I murmured, settling deeper into the cushions. “Feels wonderful.” It seemed so long since we’d touched that I closed my eyes and drifted as his voice added detail upon ero
tic detail.

  “I’m not as helpless as you think, though,” I warned him softly. “You’ve pinned my arms, but my hands are free and I’m unbuttoning your shirt . . . running my hands across your chest.” My voice slowed and deepened. “I’m touching your nipples very lightly, barely brushing them with my fingertips.”

  My own breasts began to tingle as he told me where his lips were and described what his hands were doing. I could almost feel the roughness of his stubbled cheek, his face pressed hotly against me.

  “Now I’ve unbuttoned the top of your shorts,” he said huskily. “My fingers are on the zipper . . . Slowly, very slowly I—”

  The screen door slammed and a male voice said, “Hey, Deb’rah? You home or not?”

  I was so into the spell Kidd was weaving that for one confused moment, I felt as if I ought to clutch a cushion to my chest to hide my nakedness. Between telephone and washer, I hadn’t heard Reid Stephenson’s car drive up.

  “Oops!” he said as he poked his head through the door and saw me. “Sorry. Didn’t realize you were on the phone. I’ll wait. Go ahead and finish.”

  As if.

  Mood shattered, I told Kidd I’d call him later.

  “’Fraid I won’t be here,” he said with a long regretful sigh. “Roy and me, we’re patrolling the water tonight. Lot of drunk boat drivers’ll be out. But, Deb’rah?”

  “Yes?”

  “Remind me to punch your cousin in the nose the next time I come up, hear?”

  * * *

  “Hey, you didn’t have to get off the phone on my account,” said Reid.

  “Yes, I did,” I said grumpily. “What’re you doing out this way anyhow?”

  Dressed in dark red shirt, white sneakers, no socks, Reid just stood there happily jingling his keys in the pocket of his khaki shorts. Not only is he cute as a cocker spaniel puppy with his big hazel eyes and his curly brown hair, he has a puppy’s sunny good nature and isn’t easily insulted, which is probably why he’s so successful with women. Takes more than a whack with a newspaper to discourage him when there’s a tasty treat in sight.

  “I brought you a housewarming present.”

  He beckoned me out to the porch. There on the table was a long flat box wrapped in brown paper, tied with a gingham ribbon and topped with a spray of what looked like dried grasses.