Death's Half Acre

by Margaret Maron

  “Should you be reading that?” the preacher asked sternly. “Isn’t this Dwight’s province?”

  “Oh, one little look can’t hurt,” said the pragmatist. “You’ll be doing him a favor, saving him some time by seeing if there’s real evidence of wrongdoing or just pure speculation.”

  Linsey had kept news clippings and public tax records and scraps of notes to himself. There was also a very rough chart that appeared to list cause and effect. It would seem that Danny Creedmore had given Candace Bradshaw specific directions on how to vote on certain issues. Okay, that was generally known. What I couldn’t immediately understand was that Candace seemed to have given him information on deals that hadn’t actually come before the board, deals that allowed him to get in early and either buy up land before it had been offered at a public sale or put in bids for jobs that weren’t yet formulated.

  It looked as if Candace had a network of spies all over the county. Maybe we’d underestimated her. Maybe she was a lot more savvy than we’d thought. Linsey had felt the same way, because scribbled after one of those deals was his frustrated “How the sandpaper did she know?” and it was circled in heavy black lead.

  Seeing that gave me a bittersweet smile. One of Linsey’s more endearing traits was his refusal to use regular cusswords.

  If Linsey’s facts and figures were right though, Candace must have been doing very well from her liaison with Danny. For sure, he had gotten rich off of her information. What’s weird is that the partnership began long before she ran for the board.

  Was her board seat a reward for services already rendered instead of a positioning for services to come?

  No matter which, if Terry Wilson’s Ginsburg twins could substantiate these charges, Candace could well have been looking at jail time.

  Danny, too.

  How lucky for them that Linsey had died and Ruby Dixon had taken over the paper.

  “Yeah, wasn’t it?” said the pragmatist.

  Dwight and Cal came back to the house about a half-hour later. They had found and tagged three young redbuds that Dwight planned to move the next time rain was predicted. I thought he was running out of places to put trees, but he seemed to think that because they don’t make heavy shade they could go in one of the azalea beds.

  He was ready to stretch out on the couch and watch a ball game, but Cal asked if he could ride his bike over to Andrew’s. One of the rabbit dogs had a new litter of puppies and he was anxious to see them.

  “Finished your homework?” Dwight asked.

  “Yessir.”

  “Okay with you, Deborah?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Just don’t try to talk Uncle Andrew out of one. Bandit might get jealous.”

  “Okay,” he said and promised to be home before dark.

  Dwight wandered out to the kitchen, where I was pouring myself a glass of wine. “Any of that peach cobbler left?”

  “One serving. With your name on it.”

  Dwight sat down at the table to eat it and I gave him Linsey’s file on Candace Bradshaw. “You may think this is crazy, darling, but what if Candace found out that Linsey had all this material and was getting ready to write about it in the paper? What if she was out in her car the night he was killed?”

  “Huh?”

  “Well, you heard Stevie. Dee’s still sulking because Candace gave away a practically new Toyota last spring and then immediately bought another one. And y’all never found the Toyota that hit him.”

  He paused with his fork in midair. “She griped about it to Terry and me Friday, too. And you know what else? Dee even said it galled Candace every time Linsey wrote something negative about her. A no-good cousin from Georgia, huh? Be a real convenient way to get it out of the area.”

  He put down his fork, picked up his phone, and punched in some numbers. When he reached the detective on duty, he said, “See if you can run down Dee Bradshaw or her dad and find out when Candace Bradshaw got rid of her old car last spring. And while you’re at it, get the name and address of the cousin she gave it to.”

  CHAPTER 16

  . . . charged with exit

  routes wrongturned.

  —Paul’s Hill, by Shelby Stephenson

  On Monday morning, we learned that Candace’s body had been released and that there had been a private cremation the afternoon before. Only Cameron Bradshaw, her daughter Dee, her office manager Gracie Farmer, and the minister of her church were present. There was mention of a future memorial service once her killer was found and locked away. In the meantime, it was said that Cameron wanted to buy space in a columbarium for the two of them, but that Dee thought she should be scattered over Colleton County from a helicopter. No one seemed to know exactly where her ashes were at the moment, only that Cameron had bought a very expensive and very tasteful urn for their eventual repose.

  I was callous enough not to care about the whereabouts of her ashes so much as the whereabouts of her previous car.

  “Sorry, hon,” Dwight said when we passed in the back halls sometime in mid-morning. He was upstairs to testify in a superior court trial; I was on a break while the attorney tried to bargain down the charges on his client with Julie Walsh, today’s prosecutor. “Bradshaw says he doesn’t remember a cousin and the daughter’s not answering her phone. Richards has gone to talk with the office manager, see if there are any personal records. And Terry’s got Sabrina Ginsburg looking on her computer for an address book.”

  “What about Georgia’s DMV?” I asked.

  “Down, tiger,” he said with a grin. “We’ll get there. It’ll just be easier all around if we have a name for them.”

  I conscientiously put the matter on a back burner of my mind and concentrated on the cases before me. In addition to the usual roll call of simple assaults, property damages, and break-ins, we had Elton Lee back in court again.

  Less than a year ago, Mr. Lee had stood in front of me and pled guilty to a Class H felony, obtaining property by false pretenses. I had given him a suspended eight-month prison sentence on the condition he pay restitution and remain on probation for three years. Yet here he was again on the same charges: two more real estate scams.

  Somehow or other, the man manages to get access to empty houses. Either they are houses that have been on the market a while or else they are model homes in half-built, modestly priced developments. Preying on the hopes and dreams of his low-income victims, he poses as a sympathetic real estate agent, takes their five-or six-hundred-dollar down payments, and then quits taking their calls. When one of his victims recognized him at a local grocery store, he told her that there was something wrong with her credit and that he was still trying to get her loan approved. She was trusting enough to give him another three hundred dollars to help hurry things along.

  After taking his guilty plea to these new charges and hearing a summary of the facts, I found him guilty again.

  “Mr. Lee, what’s it going to take to make you stop doing this?” I asked him.

  He gave me a sheepish shrug. He really does have a warm and charming smile and he’s articulate as well. I can readily understand how his victims could trust him, especially when they so want to believe that he’s helping them buy a home of their very own. This was a man who could sell snake oil to doctors.

  “You realize this new offense means you have violated your probation and that some judges would send you to jail for eight months right this minute?”

  “No, ma’am, Your Honor, I didn’t, but I surely hope you won’t have to do that,” he said earnestly.

  Frankly, I did, too. If I gave him active time, his victims would get no restitution.

  “I see that you paid restitution for your first conviction?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Well, that’s one thing in your favor.” I sat back in my chair and considered all the possibilities. At last I leaned forward and said, “Here’s what we’re going to do, Mr. Lee. I’m going to sentence you to another eight months, to run consecutively with the f
irst eight, and contingent upon several conditions. That means when you’ve served the first, you get to serve the second if you break probation again. Do you understand, sir?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I do.”

  “This time, I’m ordering house arrest. You’ll wear an ankle monitor for the duration so that your probation officer can keep track of you and the only place you can go is to church and a legitimate job. And you will pay restitution to these new people even if you have to sell your own house. Do you understand that?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You’re a bright man, Mr. Lee. There’s no reason why you couldn’t be a very successful salesman somewhere in the business world.”

  “Even with this against me?” he asked.

  “Even with this against you.”

  “Ma’am, you reckon you could write me a letter of recommendation?”

  I couldn’t help returning his smile. “You apply for a job and I’ll consider it,” I told him.

  What the hell? He’d be a natural for a boss willing to keep him on a short leash.

  Dwight and I met for lunch at the Bright Leaf Restaurant and he reported that Dee was still not answering her phone, but that a likely Georgia name had been found among Candace’s records: Manfred “Manny” Wells of Peach Blossom Mobile Estates in a suburb of Augusta, Georgia. Just over the South Carolina border off I-95.

  “Wells was Candace’s maiden name,” Dwight told me.

  I was ready to send the cavalry down I-95 to circle Manny’s double-wide until he gave up the car, but I reined in my impatience and reminded myself that I had leaped to groundless conclusions before. It could still be a total coincidence that Candace, in an act of unprecedented generosity, had given away a practically new Toyota at around the same time that Linsey Thomas was killed by one.

  “Thanks for not telling me it’s none of my business,” I said as the waitress departed after bringing me a small spinach salad and Dwight a grilled chicken sandwich.

  “So long as you remember it really isn’t,” he warned me. “What did Portland say when you told her?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  Dwight knows that Portland Brewer used to be the first person I hashed out all my concerns and speculations with. She’s Uncle Ash’s niece and we bonded as children over a mutual hatred of an angelic little prisspot who used to tell on us and get us into trouble. She will always be my best friend, someone with whom I can bitch and moan about life’s big and little irritations. We’ve been too close for too long for that to change in a major way. Her marriage to Avery didn’t change things and neither has mine to Dwight. Shortly before we married, I had admitted that yes, Portland knew he was good in bed. “Just as I know that Avery is. But if he’s ever had performance anxieties, Por never mentioned it. That would be off-limits. Same for anything to do with your job, okay?”

  For some reason, though, he finds it hard to believe that we really don’t tell each other every single thing.

  We were sitting adjacent to each other at the table and I put my hand on his knee under the table. “Performance anxieties?”

  “Okay, okay.” He covered my hand with his. “I get it.”

  I smiled and took another bite of my salad. The spinach leaves were young and tender and so flavorful that they could have come out of Cletus and Daddy’s garden. The croutons had a homemade herb-and-onion flavor and offered a crunchy contrast to the greens and sliced hard-boiled eggs. “Have the Ginsburgs come up with anything solid against Danny Creedmore?”

  Dwight swallowed a bite of chicken and shook his head. “If Candace kept any records, she’s covered her tracks well. There’s nothing incriminating on her hard drive and they still can’t find the flash drive she’s supposed to have used. By the way, they told Terry to tell you thanks for Linsey Thomas’s files. They seem to think they’re going to find pure gold there.”

  As we ate, several people had stopped by the table to speak to us—attorneys, various county department heads, and Jamie Jacobson, who leaned in close to murmur, “You were asking if Danny Creedmore had a connection to Sassy Solutions? I mentioned it to my husband and he told me that Sassy is owned by Danny’s brother-in-law. We definitely need to talk tomorrow.”

  “What was that about?” Dwight asked as she moved toward the door.

  “She and a Raleigh advertising agency were asked to submit proposals for the ads for Grayson Village last year. The other company got the job.”

  “So?”

  “So one of Linsey’s diagrams linked that agency to Grayson Village through Danny and Candace. You might want to point that out to the Ginsburgs.”

  He made a note of it and signaled our waitress that he was ready to pay. As we walked back to the courthouse, he offered to pick up a pizza for our supper. “I suppose you’ll want a side of those disgusting anchovies?”

  “Yes, but I always keep a jar on hand, so don’t bother getting more.” One quick kiss in the momentarily deserted atrium, then we parted at the stairs, I to the courtroom upstairs, he to his office down below.

  “I’ll try not to be late,” I promised.

  In the end though, it was Dwight who was late. Cal and I had to settle for scrambled eggs instead of pizza.

  The reason Dee Bradshaw wasn’t answering her phone today was because someone had shot her the night before.

  Once in the back, once in the head.

  CHAPTER 17

  Then it was gone . . .

  The world takes back its toys, my mama used to say.

  —Paul’s Hill, by Shelby Stephenson

  Mid-afternoon on Monday and Deputy Percy Denning turned to Major Bryant. “You remember that slug I dug out of the rug here on Friday?” He had photographed the crime scene from one end of the room to the other. Now he gingerly pried a new slug from the wall. “This looks like the same size. A .22, I’d say. What do you want to bet that when I get them under a microscope they’ll both match the two in her?”

  “No bet,” Dwight said, as he tried to reconstruct the shooting. Dee’s body lay facedown in the living room, on a line with the hole in the wall, a hole that was almost chest-high to Denning.

  “She was running away from the shooter,” he theorized. “The first bullet missed, the other got her square in the back. Or the first bullet took her down before the second one arrived.”

  From behind him, Deputy Richards said, “Then to make sure she was dead, he stood over her and fired again through the side of her head.”

  Three days ago, she had been vibrant and sexy and looking forward to her inheritance, thought Dwight. A spoiled slacker, Stevie had called her. The daughter of a woman who didn’t know how to be a mother, according to Gracie Farmer. From his own observation, she had been a conflicted young woman who had not finished growing up.

  Now she never would.

  “Did she surprise an intruder or was the shooter someone she let in herself?” Dwight wondered aloud.

  “I think she let him in.” Richards pointed to the dead girl’s bare feet. “Looks like she kicked off her shoes there by the couch. There’s her wineglass, the cork, and the opener. Her glass is still half full, but the bottle’s almost empty. She might have drunk it all herself, but someone else could have had a glass with her.”

  “Make a note of it for the ME,” Dwight told Denning. “You check the kitchen, Richards?”

  “Yessir, and there are dirty dishes and fast-food cartons but no used wineglass. Either he washed it clean and put it back on the shelf or else took it with him. Seems like everybody’s heard of DNA these days.”

  Her rueful tone reminded him of something Bo Poole had said about one of the county’s high sheriffs. “I heard that a sheriff back in the nineteen-twenties tried to keep Linsey Thomas’s granddaddy from describing fingerprint technology in the Ledger. He thought it was telling the criminals how not to get caught.”

  “Yeah,” said Denning as he bagged and tagged the slug. “Even if we had the
time and equipment to process this house like one of those CSI shows on television, so many people have tromped through here the last few days, there’s no way you could separate out what’s relevant from what isn’t.”

  From his aggrieved tone, Dwight knew he was still smarting over having to admit in court last week that no, he had not lifted fingerprints off the digital camera that a thief, the meth-addicted son of a local businessman, had walked out of the store with.

  “He had it inside his jacket,” Denning would say to anyone who would listen. “Why the hell would we bother to match his fingerprints to it? He was holding the fricking thing when he was arrested!” Nevertheless, until someone with a little common sense finally spoke up, the jury had almost declared the shoplifter not guilty because of that lack.

  “Anything else disturbed or different from when you were here last?” Dwight asked them as two more deputies returned from canvassing the neighbors, who, predictably, had seen nothing.

  Richards shrugged. “Denning and I think that her room is messier than it was before. But then she moved back in on Saturday, so she had at least a day and a half to trash it some more. Drawers and cabinet doors are open all over the house, and there’re some cardboard boxes in her bedroom and in the kitchen, like she was starting to pack up whatever she planned to keep.”

  “Can’t say for sure if she tossed the house or someone else did,” said Denning. “Looking at the kitchen, I’ve got her pegged as a natural slob. Most of the drawer knobs are too textured to show prints. I got a couple of smears off the smooth knobs in the kitchen, but that’s it.”

  One of the EMS techs pointedly tapped his watch. “How ’bout it, Major Bryant? Can we transport her now?”

  “Yeah, okay,” Dwight said, and watched as they zipped Dee Bradshaw’s small stiff body into a body bag, lifted her onto the gurney, and wheeled her through the doorway.