CHAPTER 15
Kate was beginning to wonder if she’d ever get over this new propensity for drifting off to sleep whenever she got quiet and still. Cartoons flickering across the television screen had already lulled Mary Pat into a nap.
“I may take off my shoes,” she had told Kate a half hour earlier. Within ten minutes, she was curled into a tight little ball next to Kate on the couch.
Gordon had allowed enough time for the police to drive out from town; and, after telling Kate to ask the maid if she wanted more coffee, he had driven back to the creek bridge to direct the lawmen when they arrived.
That was over an hour ago.
Kate thought of her own bed with longing, but at least the study here at Gilead was furnished for comfortable lounging. She hooked the edge of a hassock with her toe and tugged it closer. As she settled herself into the cushions, her drowsy thought was that if Dwight Bryant didn’t come soon, she was going to be too punchy to talk.
She would have preferred to go back to the farm, but the sheriff’s office had requested that they wait together at Gilead since Gilead was nearer the abandoned car site.
She stifled another yawn just as Sally Whitley came into the room carrying a light afghan. With practiced ease, Sally shifted Mary Pat out from under Kate’s elbow and covered the sleeping child.
“Would you like a blanket, too?” she asked.
“Don’t tempt me,” said Kate, struggling to her feet.
“Please don’t get up. I’m sorry I disturbed you.”
“You didn’t disturb me. In fact, I’m glad you came. Another five minutes and it would have taken dynamite to blast me off that couch.”
Kate patted her pockets in the unrealistic hope that she might have broken her own rules. For the past week, she’d quit taking cigarettes with her when she went outdoors, another ploy to stretch the time between smokes. It had been almost four hours now.
“Did you want cigarettes?” asked Sally. She took a leather box from a nearby table and held it open for Kate.
“Oh yes, please,” Kate said gratefully. “I’ve cut down a lot, but I just can’t seem to quit entirely.”
“I’ve heard it’s hard,” said Sally.
“You’ve never smoked?”
“No.”
There was an awkward moment, then, reluctantly, Kate’s politeness triumphed over her addiction. “If it bothers you—”
“Oh, no!” the younger woman assured her. “Do go ahead. Please. Tom smokes. And Mr. Tyrrell, of course. It doesn’t bother me. I just never have. I don’t know why. It’s not because I’m a health nut or anything, although they do say—”
“They sure do,” Kate sighed and guiltily struck a match. She would only smoke half of it, she promised herself, happily noting that the cigarette was one of the extra-long brands.
Mary Pat stirred in her sleep.
Sally looked down at the small figure indulgently. “She tells me she’s too big to take naps anymore, but she almost always falls asleep after her walks with you and Mr. Tyrrell.”
“They certainly do know their own minds at that age, don’t they?”
Sally Whitley agreed that they did.
The conversation stalled again.
“Tom’s done wonders with the packhouse,” Kate said heartily. “He’s zipped right through the new shelves and cabinets; even the new plumbing’s finished.”
“Yes, he said it was going faster than he expected.”
“Was he always so handy with tools?”
“I’m not sure. I think so.”
At Kate’s puzzled look, Sally added shyly, “We’ve only known each other about a year. In fact, we met last July, right after I graduated, and got married in August.”
“He is a fast worker,” Kate smiled.
Sally blushed and smoothed her fair hair away from her face with a self-conscious gesture.
Privately, Kate marveled that two such shy people had connected that quickly.
“So how are you liking the East Coast?”
“It’s okay . . . different, anyhow,” Sally said with such obvious tact that Kate couldn’t help smiling again.
“I was never away from L.A. before. The city, you know? Living in the country, inland and away from the ocean, is a totally new experience. For me. Not like Tom.”
“That’s right, he was in the army for several years, wasn’t he? Did he get overseas? Europe or the Far East?”
“Maybe Vietnam right at the end,” Sally said uncertainly. “When he first joined up, I think. He doesn’t talk about it. And Fort Bragg after that. That’s why he wanted to come back here to school. He liked North Carolina.”
“I would have thought he was too young for Vietnam,” Kate said idly.
For some reason, her words seemed to increase Sally Whitley’s self consciousness and the young woman sprang up, murmured something about laundry chores, and hurried away.
For a moment, Kate’s thoughts followed in speculation, then she shrugged and left the room herself.
In the front hall, she met Bessie’s niece, who asked, “Could I get you something, Miss Kate?”
“No, thanks, DeWanda. I’ve decided to walk back down to the creek.”
“Too late, Miss Kate. I think Mr. Tyrrell just drove up.”
She opened the front door as she spoke, and Kate saw Dwight’s car parked beside Gordon’s and both men crossing the wide veranda.
“Sorry to keep you waiting so long,” the detective apologized. He carried a boxy little black case.
“Fingerprinting time,” Gordon warned her dryly.
“What?”
“We need to get yours and Mr. Tyrrell’s and the little girl’s, too,” Dwight said.
“Now just a minute,” said Gordon, pausing in his tracks. “I’ve agreed to let you take mine, and Mrs. Honeycutt may not mind having her fingerprints on file, but I’m certainly not going to let Mary Pat’s be punched into some big brother computer. Perhaps we’d better forget the whole thing.”
“That won’t happen, Mr. Tyrrell,” Dwight said patiently. “This is just for local use. See, we’ll send all the fingerprints we find on that car to the SBI. As soon as they eliminate the ones that belong to you three, they’ll destroy your cards. Anyhow,” he reminded Gordon, “we wouldn’t have to be doing this if y’all hadn’t messed with the car.”
Reluctantly, Gordon led him into the dining room and Kate watched as he inked Gordon’s fingers and rolled each one onto a special card. He was repeating the process with her fingers when a sleepy-eyed Mary Pat, still in stocking feet, found them there.
She was interested to learn that her fingers might have left invisible marks on the car she’d found; but she was still too recently awake to ask her usual questions, and she offered no resistance when Sally Whitley appeared and led her off to the kitchen for a glass of milk.
“This is going to help a lot, y’all finding that car,” said Dwight, packing up his fingerprint kit. “From the rental papers, it looks like Bernie Covington was traveling under a simple alias. He just reversed his initials and used his real first name for a last name. He would’ve had to show a charge card and driver’s license to rent a car and they should have records. With a little luck, we can maybe trace back where he’s been and what he’s been doing since he skipped bail in Florida.”
“Did you ever hear from the Mexican police?” Kate asked, abruptly remembering all their unanswered questions.
“Well,” Dwight said slowly, “yes, we did.”
“And?” asked Gordon,
Dwight became evasive. “I probably ought to let Sheriff Poole talk to you about that.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Gordon asked sharply. “Have they found part of the boat?”
“Not exactly. We got a picture of Covington from California, where he served time, and sent it down to Costa Verde. Seems there’s a pretty little senorita—leastways she sounds like she might be pretty—she remembers seeing your brother have dinner with this Covingt
on two nights before the accident.”
“Covington in Costa Verde?” asked Gordon, amazed. “With James? She’s sure?”
“Police there say she knew Mr. James Tyrrell pretty good. A Margarita Somebody-or-other.”
“Margarita Ruiz,” Gordon nodded. “She sings at one of the clubs there. James took her out a couple of times. She is pretty. But James with Covington? He never mentioned it.”
He sounded puzzled by his brother’s reticence.
“She recognized the picture of Covington. Said she saw him again a month later. Desk clerk at one of the hotels remembers seeing him, too, but he can’t remember when it was. If Covington stayed in town, he didn’t register under his own name. Sort of odd, isn’t it, that your brother didn’t say something about running into one of his old army buddies?”
Gordon spread his hands helplessly. “Maybe he did. There’s so much about that time that I can’t remember. This could be one more thing that I’ve forgotten.”
“You reckon?” Dwight asked dubiously. He moved to leave, then paused in the doorway. “Can I give you a lift down the turnpike, Kate? I need to ask Mr. Lacy how come he didn’t notice that car before now.”
Driving back to the farmhouse, Kate was thoughtful as Dwight negotiated the lane’s sandy ruts.
“Did the Costa Verde police say anything about a younger man with Covington?”
“You mean that kid that was on patrol with them?”
“Yes.”
“Nope. Not a word. According to that senorita, he had dinner with James Tyrrell alone.”
Kate sighed. “It just doesn’t make sense, Dwight. If Covington caused that boating accident, why was he still in Costa Verde a month later? And if he was in Mexico then, how could he be connected with Jake’s death up here?”
“Too soon to tell,” said Dwight, skirting the orchard and rolling to a stop near the kitchen porch.
“And with James and Jake both dead, why did Covington’s rental car wind up on our creek bank?” she asked. “Why would he come back at all?”
The burly detective had opened his door, but he hesitated with one foot in and the other on the ground. “I can’t say why, but we do know how the car got there. There’s a pull-off place beside the bridge that some of the old-timers fish from once in a while. It’s rough driving, but not too hard once you strike into that old track along the bank. We found snapped-off undergrowth, so we can tell the car came in from the highway and not from your woods.
“Whoever killed Covington might have met him in the packhouse after you and Mr. Lacy went to bed. After he killed Covington, he was probably left with two cars, so he stashed Covington’s down there and walked back for his own. I reckon he thought that dark green color was as good as camouflage if he stuck it deep enough into some dark green trees.”
Kate shivered. “That means the killer’s been hanging around the farm long enough to know about that old lane beside the creek. Since last October, maybe?”
“Maybe.”
“Then he could still be here—walking in and out of our houses, stealing pictures and papers.” She stared at Dwight. “Camouflage and night maneuvers! It is someone they knew in Vietnam, isn’t it?”
“Well, that’s how it looks to me,” said Dwight. “We think we’ve got a name on that kid: William Thompson.”
Kate remembered the “W.T.” Jake had scribbled on the back of one of the missing snapshots. “Has he been located?”
“Not yet. Nobody seems to know what happened to him or where he is now, twelve years later. In the meantime, no matter who put the car down yonder at the creek, I don’t see how Mr. Lacy missed it if he’s been culling over your woods.”
Kate was not surprised to realize that Dwight knew everything that was going on here at the farm, not with Miss Emily and Bessie to keep him posted; but she got a demonstration of his trained powers of observation as they crossed the yard to the chicken pen where Lacy was gathering eggs.
She had walked right past Lacy’s dilapidated old pickup without a second glance, but Dwight’s first comment after he greeted Lacy was, “I see you got that ol’ mule of yours a new set of shoes.”
Kate turned and saw the truck’s gleaming black tires. Now that Dwight had remarked on them, she could even smell the fresh new rubber. “It were about time,” Lacy said defensively. “Them other ones was as slick as Tucker Sauls’s bald head.”
“Yeah, I noticed,” Dwight grinned. “I was wondering how you passed your last inspection.”
Lacy was disinclined to bandy words across a poultry yard with the younger man. Remaining just outside the chicken house, he shifted the egg basket in his hand and said, “What can I do for you, Dwight?”
“It’s about that dead man, Mr. Lacy. Kate and Mr. Tyrrell found his car this afternoon.”
The old farmer’s eyes flicked over Kate stonily, but he listened without comment while the chickens pecked around his feet and the rooster, a big Rhode Island Red, ruffled his neck feathers in mild disapproval of their closeness beyond the fence wire.
It was down on the creek bank,” said Dwight. “Somebody drove it in from the highway and left it in a little stand of young pines.”
“That right?”
Kate recognized that Lacy was getting ready to dig in his heels and become as uncooperative as possible and suddenly, she was too tired to put up with any more of his irritating mannerisms.
“There’s no need to make a big deal out of this, Lacy. Everyone knows you and Tucker Sauls have looked at every tree on the place. Nobody’s spying on you or prying into your private affairs. All Dwight wants to know is if you were in that part of the woods since Covington was killed so he’ll know whether the car’s been there the whole time or not.”
Surprisingly, Lacy climbed down off his high horse. He didn’t exactly answer Kate, but he did tell Dwight, “We walked that stretch of creek last month. Didn’t see no borer beetles along there, so I didn’t have no occasion to go back, and if she found any car there, I can’t rightly say when it come. Not afore Washington’s Birthday, anyhow. His real birthday. ’Cause that’s the very day I was there—February 22. Mail didn’t run on Monday, but Wednesday was his real birthday and I remarked on that to Sauls when we was walking back to the truck.”
Artificial holidays were a pet peeve with Lacy even though Jake used to get down more often because of them. Having never planned his life around a forty-hour work week, Lacy didn’t hold with messing up the calendar just to give city folks some extra three-day weekends.
Amusement mingling with exasperation, Kate left the two men at the chicken yard and headed for the house. Baby or no baby, she decided she deserved something a little stronger than iced tea before she began supper.
CHAPTER 16
Dwight Bryant shared Sheriff Poole’s enthusiasm for the modern tools of law enforcement: the chemicals that could develop fingerprints years after they were laid down; the Identi-Kits that could build up composites into such lifelike pictures that witnesses would say, “Yeah, that’s him! That’s the man who robbed the Winn-Dixie last night”; the serological tests that linked victim with killer; or, most useful of all, the space-age electronic PIN terminal which occupied a tabletop in their nineteenth-century courthouse office. Operated by the FBI, the Police Information Network connected their little force with the largest in the nation and there was nothing to touch it for tracing stolen guns, stolen cars, or persons with criminal records; but for information of a local nature, a detective asking his own questions face-to-face was still the best road to go, thought Dwight, as he buttered up the matronly manager of a rental car concession just off the main lobby of the Raleigh-Durham air terminal.
It was Tuesday morning and already the sprawling terminal was surprisingly crowded. Basketball might get local adrenaline flowing, but the universities reached wider than sports. Duke and Carolina had always attracted foreigners to their medical programs, and State’s agriculture and engineering schools had international reputations. So wit
h the growth of the Research Triangle, Asian and Middle Eastern faces and accents had long since lost their novelty, and bursts of French, Dutch, or German mingled easily with the y’alls and drawls.
Half flirting, half flattering, while flight passengers from a dozen countries came and went, Dwight learned that the rental manager’s mother had been born and raised in Colleton County.
“In fact, Mama was a Matthews from the Leach Crossroads area.” The deputy was delighted to hear it. “She wouldn’t have been kin to Sammy Matthews, would she?” he asked, naming a man in that neighborhood with whom he had a nodding acquaintance.
“Why, Sammy Matthews is my second cousin! You know him?”
“We’ve met a few times,” said Dwight. “Knew his daddy better.”
“Uncle Hassie?”
“Hassie Matthews,” Dwight nodded. “He’s buried at my church. Fine upstanding old gentleman.”
“He certainly was,” agreed the woman. “And Aunt Naomi, too.”
Reassured that their corner of North Carolina was still a small world, she willingly checked her log sheets and called over the young clerk who had rented “Charles Bernard” a green and gray Chevrolet nearly three weeks ago.
The small, dark-haired girl had an oriental tilt to her heavily madeup eyes, yet she was just as willing to help. Unfortunately, nothing about Bernie Covington’s picture or the graphic description of the black mole on his cheek rang even the smallest bell.
Yes, that was her entry for Charles Bernard on the log sheet, so yes, she must have taken the man’s charge card, looked at his driver’s license, and eventually handed over the keys to the Chevrolet; but that was also their busiest time of the day and whether he’d been alone or traveling with a dozen people was impossible to know.
The big deputy thanked them for their time and trouble and was turning to go when a second thought occurred to him. “I don’t reckon you keep records as far back as six months, do you?”
“I reckon we sure do,” said the manager. “What date you looking for?”
They went into her tidy office behind the rental desk and Dwight asked her to work back from that October Sunday when Jake Honeycutt was killed.
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