Hard Row

by Margaret Maron

  “Not Mr. Harris?”

  “Well, you know Buck.” He paused and looked at them dubiously. “Or do you?”

  “Never met him that I know of,” said Dwight.

  “Me neither,” said Jamison.

  “Buck didn’t mind cutting corners if it would save a few dollars.”

  “In what way?”

  Lomax shrugged. “Hard to think of any one thing. He’s one of those up-by-his-bootstraps guys. Always saying he started with nothing and built it into something. Wasn’t completely nothing though, was it? He had what was left of his granddaddy’s farm. Gave him a place to stand while he leveraged the rest. Not the most patient man you’d ever want to meet. Couldn’t bear to see any workers standing around idle if the clock was running. Thought they ought to keep picking tomatoes or cutting okra even if it was pouring down rain because that’s what he did when he first started. Always pushing the limits.”

  “You got along with him though?”

  “Enough that I never quit him. Came close a couple of times. But he paid good wages for hard work and he knew he didn’t have to be breathing down my neck every minute to make sure I was keeping to the schedule. And most of the time he could laugh about things. He liked to keep tabs on whatever was going on. He’d come out here in the fields and get his hands dirty once in awhile or plow for a few hours. That man did love to sit a tractor.”

  “Yet you weren’t surprised when he didn’t show up for two weeks?”

  Again the shrug. “I knew he and Mrs. Harris were fighting it out in court. I figured that’s where he was.”

  “You have a couple here named Ramon and Strella?”

  “Ramon? Sure. Only they’re not on the place now.” Once more he consulted his Palm Pilot. “They moved over to Harris Farm Three back around Thanksgiving. That’s down near New Bern.”

  “Any objection if we question the people still here?” Dwight asked.

  “No problem. Either of you speak Spanish?”

  As both deputies shook their heads, Lomax unclipped the walkie-talkie on his belt. “Let me get Juan for you. He’s pretty fluent in English.” When the walkie-talkie crackled, the farm manager said, “Hey, Juan? Come on in, bo.”

  Immediately, one of the tractors broke off and headed in their direction.

  Before it reached them, though, Dwight’s own phone buzzed again.

  “Hey, Major?” Denning said. “You might want to get back over here. We’ve found Harris’s car. I think we’ve also found the slaughterhouse.”

  CHAPTER 18

  A good barn is essential, and no farmer can afford to be without one, which should be of sufficient size for all the purposes to which it is to be appropriated.

  —Profitable Farming in the Southern States, 1890

  DWIGHT BRYANT

  MONDAY AFTERNOON, MARCH 6

  Sid Lomax followed Dwight and Jack Jamison back to a cluster of outbuildings, which were screened from sight of the farmhouse and garage by a thick row of tall evergreen trees and bushes. In addition to the usual shelters, several of the sheds held specialized equipment for the different crops. The two trucks pulled up in front of a shed where Richards was already cordoning the place off with a roll of Denning’s yellow crime scene tape. This shed was built for utility, not beauty: a concrete slab flush with the ground, steel studs, steel framing, a tinned roof that sloped from front to back, no windows. One of the tall double doors stood open and gave enough light to see that a silver BMW was parked inside.

  “What’s this shed used for?” Dwight asked Lomax as they walked closer.

  “It’s where we store the tomato sprayers, but we sent them on to the other farms before Christmas because we’re going to grow beans here this year. It’s supposed to be empty right now.”

  “Watch where you put your feet and don’t touch anything,” Richards cautioned him as he started to follow them inside.

  Not that there was that much to touch. The car was the only object of any size in a space designed to hold at least two large pieces of machinery.

  As they entered, Dwight paused and examined the door fastenings. The hasp was a hinged steel strap that slotted over a sturdy steel staple meant to hold a padlock and secure the strap. A wooden peg hung from a string but there was no padlock in sight and no sign that the doors had been forced.

  Lomax followed his eyes. “We keep the sheds locked if there’s something worth stealing in them,” he said, “but we don’t bother when they’re empty, just peg the doors shut. I doubt I’ve stuck my head in here since Christmas.”

  Carefully, Denning used a screwdriver to pull a chain that released the catch for the other door and let it swing wide, then used equal care to switch on a couple of bare lightbulbs overhead that immediately lit up the gory scene at the rear of the shed.

  Blood, lots of blood, had pooled at a slight low spot and blow flies and maggots were busily churning it on this mild spring day. Small dried chunks were scattered around.

  “Bone,” Denning said succinctly.

  The bloody axe had been flung to one side but there were deep gouges in the concrete floor where the blade had come down heavily.

  But that wasn’t the worst.

  The real horror was a length of bloody rusty iron chain that lay in heavy loops, the links caked in blood and gore, the two ends secured with a lock.

  “Dear God,” Lomax murmured. “He was alive and conscious when the hacking started?”

  Denning nodded grimly. “Looks like it.”

  “And after it was finished,” said Dwight, “the killer didn’t need to open the lock. He just pulled away the pieces.”

  Lomax turned away and bolted for the door. They heard him retching, but there were no grins from any of them for a civilian’s involuntary reaction.

  Except for Denning, all of them had grown up on working farms where food animals had been routinely slaughtered to fill the family freezer for the winter, but that sort of killing was done cleanly and as humanely as possible.

  This though—!

  I’m getting too hardened, Richards thought sadly. What would Mike think of me that I’m not out there throwing up, too?

  “Looks like his clothes over here,” said Denning.

  Jockey shorts lay tangled with a jacket, shirt, and pair of pants. Shoes and socks had been tossed into a corner.

  “No blood,” said Richards. “So he was stripped naked before the chain went on.”

  Jamison was appalled by the level of cruelty. “Somebody really hated his guts, didn’t they?”

  “But where the hell’s the head and penis?” asked Dwight. “Either of y’all check the car?”

  “Not there,” Richards said. “The keys are in the ignition though.”

  Dwight peered through the windshield. The steering wheel sported a black lambswool cover, so no chance of fingerprints from it.

  “Y’all open the trunk?”

  “Not yet,” Richards admitted.

  They waited for Percy Denning to dust the door handle. “Too smeared,” he reported.

  After gingerly extracting the key from the ignition, he fitted one of them into the trunk lock.

  Richards held her breath as the lid lifted and immediately realized she was not the only one when the others collectively exhaled.

  The trunk was upholstered in dark gray and, except for the spare tire, appeared at first to be empty. And then they took a second look.

  “Shit!” said Denning. He got his camera and took pictures of the stains on the floor and lid of the trunk and of the once-white undershirt with which the killer had probably wiped the worst of the blood from his hands. “This was the delivery truck.”

  CHAPTER 19

  With a zest, seasoned and heightened by congenial companionship, let him have at times . . . such festivities as sweep from the brain the cobwebs of care.

  —Profitable Farming in the Southern States, 1890

  DEBORAH KNOTT

  MONDAY AFTERNOON, MARCH 6

  After lunc
h, I finished up the first appearances. Normally, unless an address is familiar for other reasons, I don’t pay much attention to the ones given by the miscreants who come before me, but so soon after talking with Dwight and with the Harris divorce on my mind, I looked closer at the Latino who had been picked up Saturday night and was charged with possession of two rocks of cocaine.

  “Ward Dairy Road?” I asked through the interpreter. “Harris Farms?”

  “Sí,” he said and followed that with a burst of Spanish. The only word I caught was Harris and the interpreter, a young woman going for an associate degree in education out at Colleton Community, confirmed that he lived in the Harris Farms migrant camp out there on the old Buckley place.

  I appointed him an attorney, set his bond at five thousand, and before remanding him to the custody of the jailer, asked if he knew Mr. Harris.

  “¿Conoce el Señor Harris?”

  From the negative gestures and the tone of his reply, I was not surprised to hear that this guest worker knew the “big boss” by sight but had never had direct dealings with him.

  The rest of his reply was almost lost to me as a distraught white woman burst through the doors at the rear of the courtroom with a wailing infant. There was a huge red abrasion on the side of her face and blood dripped from her cut lip onto the dirty pink blanket wrapped around the baby.

  A uniformed policewoman hurried in after her, calling, “Ma’am? Ma’am?”

  “Please!” she cried as the bailiff moved out to intercept her. “He’s going to kill me and the baby, too! You got to stop him! You got to! Please?”

  Between us, we got her calmed down enough to speak coherently and give me the details I needed to issue an immediate domestic violence protection order. Someone from the local safe house was in the courtroom next door and she volunteered to take the woman and her baby to the shelter.

  As things returned to normal, I finished the last of the first appearances and sent them snuffling back to jail to await trial or try to make bail. While the ADA got ready to pull the first shuck on today’s criminal trials, I asked my clerk to check on when I’d signed the summary judgment for the Harris divorce.

  At the break, I phoned Dwight, who was out at the old Buckley place by then and gave him the date—Monday, February 20. “Four full days before those legs were found,” I said.

  “So if he died before then, maybe the wife decided she’d rather inherit everything instead of having to divide it with his heirs?”

  “Only if she withdraws her request for the ED,” I reminded him.

  “Who are they, by the way?”

  “I haven’t a clue,” I said, resisting the urge to go into all the possible legalities that could complicate his simplistic summation. “Reid might know. Am I still going to see you in a couple of hours?”

  “I’ll be there,” he promised.

  I adjourned at 5:30, then got held up to sign some orders, so that I went downstairs prepared to apologize for being a little late. I needn’t have worried.

  Melanie Ashworth, the department’s recently hired spokesperson, was holding forth about something to reporters in the main lobby, so I crossed out of camera range and asked the dispatcher on duty what was up.

  “They just identified all those body parts,” he whispered. “It’s Buck Harris.”

  I walked on down the hall. Dwight was in Bo’s office with a couple of deputies, and they seemed to be discussing something serious. He held up a with-you-in-a-minute finger and I signaled that I’d wait for him in his office. It did not look good for the home team. Even though Cal and I both needed for me to follow through on this, I should have known better than to try to set up an evening with Dwight when he was in the middle of a sensational murder investigation.

  Fortunately, I had brought along some reading material, although it didn’t make me happy to read that a colleague had been reversed on an earlier ruling. She had ordered the divorced father of minor children to turn in all his guns until the children were grown. This was after he himself testified that yes, he did keep a loaded handgun on the dash of his truck and loaded long guns in the house and no, he didn’t plan to lock them up in a gun cabinet or have them fitted with trigger locks because his kids knew better than to mess with them.

  The father had appealed and the higher court had sided with the dad. I just hoped my friend would never have to send those judges the obituary of one of those kids with an “I told you so” scribbled across it.

  I had rendered a similar judgment almost a month ago, but so far that father hadn’t appealed. With a little luck, he might never hear that there were higher courts that would let him put his preschoolers in harm’s way. I certainly wasn’t going to tell him.

  Dwight was still tied up when I finished reading the official stuff, so I pulled out Blood Done Sign My Name, my book club’s selection for March.

  I know, I know. My club is always behind the curve, but hey, sometimes it’s helpful to let the first waves of enthusiasm wash out what’s trendy and leave what’s solid. We’ve spared ourselves a lot of best sellers that weren’t worth the trees it took to print them. With this book, the first sentence grabbed me by the throat and was so compelling that I was deep into it by the time Dwight finally got free

  “Sorry about supper, shug,” he said when he joined me. To my surprise, it was five past seven. “I guess we’ll have to get something at the game.”

  I slid my book into the tote bag that held my purse and papers. “You’re not going to blow me off?”

  “Nope. You’re right. We’ve got good people. Let ’em run with the ball.”

  He picked up his jacket, held my coat for me, and switched off the light behind us.

  “Enjoy the game,” Bo called as we passed his office.

  Happily, the lobby was now bare of reporters.

  “They were all over the Harris story when I got here. Y’all hired Melanie Ashworth just in time, didn’t you?” I said, holding out my hand for his keys. Late as it was, we didn’t have time to meander in to Raleigh with him behind the wheel.

  He handed them over without dissenting argument and said tiredly, “You don’t know the half of it. It’s been one hellacious day. Remember that second right hand we found?”

  “The Alzheimer’s patient who drowned in Apple Creek?”

  Dwight nodded. “The autopsy report just came in. The body’s definitely Fred Mitchiner, but it turns out that an animal didn’t just pull the hand loose. Somebody cut it off.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. That hand had been in the water so long that the connective tissues were pretty much gone, but there was a ligament that must have still been intact because it was only recently cut off. Not when he first died.”

  “Someone killed him?”

  “Hard to say. The ME doesn’t think so. There’s no evidence of trauma to the body, but he’d been in the water so long that there’s no way to know if he drowned by accident or if someone held him under.”

  I gave Dwight my tote bag to stash behind the seat and unlocked the truck. Although we were in danger of missing the opening face-off, we would also miss the rush hour traffic.

  “Another cute thing,” Dwight said as we pulled out of the parking lot behind the courthouse. “A lot of Alzheimer’s patients will try to get away, but the nursing home has said all along that Mitchiner wasn’t one to wander off. For some reason the place reminded him of spending the summers at his grandparents’ house with a bunch of cousins, so he was pretty content there.”

  “So content that they didn’t put an electronic bracelet on him?”

  “Exactly. Another reason that the family’s claiming negligence. You do know that the town’s speed limit is thirty-five, don’t you?”

  I braked for a red light and adjusted his mirrors while I waited for the green. “When’s the last time a Dobbs police officer stopped a sheriff’s deputy for speeding?”

  “That’s because we don’t speed unless we’ve got a blue light flashing.”<
br />
  “Hmmm,” I said, and reached as if to turn his on.

  He snorted and batted my hand away. “You try that and I’ll write you up myself.”

  “Any theories as to how and why he wound up in the creek? Who profits?”

  “Nobody. That’s the hell of it. He was there on Medicaid. No property. No bank account. His nearest relatives are the daughter who’s suing and a sixteen-year-old grandson and everybody says they were both devoted to the old man. One or the other was there almost every day for the last two years, ever since she had to put him there because they couldn’t handle him at home anymore what with her working and the kid in school. Wasn’t like the Parsons woman.”

  “That the one down in Makely?”

  “Yeah. She had children and grandchildren, too, but when she went missing, none of them noticed till the nursing home told them. They say nobody from the family had come to visit her in nearly a year.”

  “Didn’t stop them from trying to get damages for mental anguish, though, did it?” I said, recalling some of the details.

  He laughed and relaxed a little as I merged onto the interstate where it’s legal to go seventy and troopers usually turn a blind eye to seventy-five.

  “What about Buck Harris’s place?” I asked. “Anything turn up there?”

  “Oh yes,” he said, his jaw tightening. “He was butchered in one of the sheds back of the house.”

  Without going into too many of the grisly details, he hit the high spots of what they had found—a locked chain, the fact that Harris had been naked and probably conscious when the first axe blow fell, how the killer must have used the trunk of Harris’s car to strew the body parts along Ward Dairy Road.

  I mulled over the chronology and tried not to visualize what he had described. “Nobody saw him after that Sunday, the divorce was final on Monday, his legs weren’t found till Friday and the ME’s setting the time of death as when?”

  “Originally between Saturday and Thursday, but that’s been narrowed down to Sunday as the earliest possible day.”