“Good work,” Dwight said approvingly. “So who owns ours?”
“The jewelry store’s old invoices show that they stocked twenty silver pens from that company in four different designs. Five were the ‘Windsor Ivy.’ They have no documentation as to who bought three of the pens—those have to be Mr. Lee’s three—but they do know that two pens were sold at employee discount to the then-manager, who now works in their flagship store in New Orleans.”
“Did you call him?” asked Dwight.
“Her,” said Richards, allowing herself the smallest of smiles for the first time. “She’s not there today, so I left a message that I’d call tomorrow.”
“Excellent,” said Dwight. “Keep me informed.”
“Yes, sir.” She handed him some papers. “These are Jamison’s interviews with the rest of the motel staff. Nothing useful. And the ME faxed over his preliminary report.”
Dwight skimmed through the technical terms that basically said yes, Lynn Bullock had indeed died of strangulation. And based on testimony that she had been seen eating peanuts at approximately 4:45 p.m., it was safe to say that death occurred between the hours of 4:45 and 7:45 p.m.
* * *
“Cremated?” gasped Vara Seymour Benton Travers Fernandez. “We ain’t never had nobody cremated in our whole family. My daughter ought to’ve been buried proper and decent, in her body, not burnt to ashes.”
Jason Bullock looked at his mother-in-law and took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, Vara, but it’s what Lynn wanted. We discussed it when I drew up our wills and that’s what we both decided to do.”
“She never!” Vara said stubbornly. “She ever tell you that, Lurleen?”
“Wills?” said Lynn’s half-sister. “She always said she was going to will me her pink ice necklace and earring set. Did she?”
The older woman was skinny as a tobacco stick inside a pair of tight black slacks and a sleeveless top patterned in tiger stripes. Her orangy-blonde hair had been colored and bleached so many times it had thinned until you could see the scalp between the hair follicles. “You mean they’s not going to be a church service or nothing?”
“We don’t—Lynn didn’t—neither of us belong to a church, Vara. It was something we meant to do, but . . .”
Jason Bullock’s voice trailed away in regret. A church would have given structure to this hopeless morass he seemed to be floundering through. There would have been churchwomen bringing food and offering comfort, a minister who could have guided him into a traditional ceremony. Instead, he was suddenly thrust into unfamiliar territory and Lynn’s only two relatives (if you didn’t count her father and a bunch of half-siblings in Florida, and Lynn certainly never had) weren’t making it any easier.
He hadn’t been able to reach either of them by phone till early Monday morning. Lurleen immediately drove down from Roxboro, swinging through Fuquay to pick up Vara and bring her over. Now they were back again this afternoon and while there was grief in their eyes, there was also greed in Lurleen’s.
He himself was so numb and conflicted at this point that he thought, Well, why not? What else was he going to do with Lynn’s things?
“You and Vara can take what you want,” he told Lurleen, “but first you’ve got to tell me. Who was Lynn sleeping with?”
“Just you, honey,” she answered guilelessly.
“Ah, cut the crap, Lurleen,” he said, suddenly angry. “You know where she died. And how.”
She gave a petulant shrug. “She didn’t tell me and that’s the gawdawful truth. We used to be like this.” She held up two crossed fingers. “But ever since y’all got so high and mighty with your fancy jobs and fancy money, she didn’t tell me shit. And every time I asked, she’d just smile and say nobody, so she could’ve been blowing the governor, for all I know.”
Tears and mascara cut dusky tracks through Vara’s makeup. “Poor little Lynnie. She wanted to be somebody and now she’s just ashes. And I didn’t even get a chance to kiss her goodbye.”
* * *
At the stoplight in Mount Olive, as a patrol car pulled even with him in the next lane over, Norwood Love kept his face expressionless, but his eyes went nervously to the pickup’s rearview mirror. Everything back there was still secure. There was no way that trooper could see what was beneath the blue plastic tarp covering the truck bed. Besides, even if he could see them, there was no law against hauling a load of empty fifty-gallon plastic pickle barrels. For all anybody could say, he was maybe planning to store hog feed in ’em. Or turn ’em on their sides and use ’em for dog kennels. Till they were full of fermenting mash, couldn’t nobody prove different.
The light changed to green and the young man pointed his truck back toward Colleton County.
* * *
Reid Stephenson’s first court appearance of the day was scheduled for two o’clock. As he left the office, he tucked the silver pen securely in the inner breast pocket of his jacket and wondered if Deborah by any chance left her doors unlocked out there on the farm.
Otherwise, he was going to have to figure out another excuse to drop by and get her pen back on her bedside table before she missed it.
CHAPTER | 10
The air is calm and sultry until a gentle breeze springs from the southeast. This breeze becomes a wind, a gale, and, finally, a tempest.
Despite the long Labor Day weekend in which to get it out of their systems, courthouse regulars were still titillating each other with gossip of Lynn Bullock’s death on Tuesday. Who was she having an affair with? Reid? Brandon Frazier? Millard King? Or was it someone yet unnamed? The more malicious tongues favored Millard King, simply because he’d become more priggish now that he was romancing the very proper Justice’s debutante daughter. Malice is always entertained when prigs try to squeeze their clay feet into glass slippers.
There were those who thought it was tacky of Lynn Bullock to sleep with so many of her husband’s peer group. “Why didn’t she keep it at the hospital?” they asked. “All those beds going to waste. Why didn’t she crawl into one with a doctor?”
“How you know she didn’t?” came the cynical reply. “And come to think of it, wouldn’t a doctor know exactly how much pressure it takes to strangle somebody?”
I’d never met the dead woman and I’d had very little to do with her husband so I shouldn’t have been drawn into the discussions, yet, given Reid’s peripheral involvement, I couldn’t help being interested.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t hearing much new.
* * *
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?”
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