The Buzzard Table

by Margaret Maron

  The sun was high in the sky when Martin Crawford stepped out onto the porch with a steaming mug of tea in his hand. For the first time in months, he had slept deeply, without the nightmares that had plagued him for so long. He felt as if a great heavy darkness had been lifted and left him—if not filled with cleansing light, then certainly with the possibility of that light.

  He yawned and gingerly flexed his left arm. It still throbbed with pain and he wondered if he had wrenched something loose again. As soon as he got back to London, he would have to try another round of therapy, see if that would help him regain his strength. His right arm felt just fine.

  He buttoned his jacket against the cold north wind and reached back inside for his hat, then walked out into the sunshine.

  The vulture he had tamed circled overhead with its two mates, then gracefully floated down to the concrete slab he whimsically called his vulture table. The other two followed.

  “No breakfast for you chaps this morning,” he called with a cheerful salute of his mug. “Time you went back to foraging on your own.”

  Even as he spoke, though, he realized that something had caught their interest on the other side of the slab. One vulture had perched on the ruined brick foundation and seemed to be peering over the edge. The other two had settled on the ground. As he watched, one of them hopped closer and dipped its neck to pull at whatever it was. Puzzled, he saw the featherless head come up with something striped in colors.

  It took a moment to realize he was seeing the Harper boy’s scarf.

  Concerned, he left his mug on the edge of the porch, hurried over to his truck, and sped across the meadow.

  The vultures flew up as he circled the slab and skidded to a stop. He immediately recognized that mop of fair hair. The Harper boy lay in a heap at the base of the wall and he did not move when Crawford called his name.

  No response, and when he touched that still white face, the skin was cool and clammy. Yet just before Crawford despaired for the boy’s life, his fingers found the barest thread of a pulse on the side of his neck. Blood had oozed from the back of his head and matted the frizzy blond curls. He hesitated.

  Move him and risk further damage, or leave him to go call for help?

  Cursing because he had left his phones at the house, he swung back into the truck and tore across the meadow.

  Moments later, he had called 911 and succinctly described the situation and his location. “The lad’s name is Jeremy Harper. He appears to have a serious head injury.”

  Dwight was eight or ten miles from the old Ferrabee place and still fuming over the FBI’s usurpation of that motel death when the call came in about the Harper boy. He signaled to the cruiser behind him and pulled a circle in the yard of Holy Tabernacle AME Church.

  Just as they arrived at the intersection near his favorite grocery, an ambulance from Western Wake Medical Center bore down on them, siren wailing and lights flashing. Dwight figured he knew the exact location better than the driver, so he streaked around it with his own lights and siren and led them through the unpaved road to the dead end, then down the lane and across the pasture to Crawford’s buzzard table, where the Englishman waited. Almost before Dwight could cut his engine, the EMS crew were out of the ambulance to work on the teenager, who lay sprawled on the ground beside the far edge of the slab, his arms thrown across his chest and his legs under his body as if he’d been dumped there feet first.

  The next few minutes were organized chaos as they loaded Jeremy Harper into the ambulance and headed back to Wake.

  “How did he get here?” Dwight asked, looking across the slab. It was littered with tufts of brown fur and small dry bones that crunched beneath his feet as he walked over to the edge and looked down at where the boy had lain.

  Martin Crawford shook his head. “I haven’t a clue, Major. He wasn’t there at sunset, when I came down to give the vultures a dead rabbit, and I didn’t see any lights before I went to bed. Didn’t hear any motor either. Without electricity, I usually turn in early and get up with the sun, but I wrenched my arm yesterday and it was bothering me so much that I took a couple of sleeping pills, so it was after ten before I awoke and perhaps another hour before I stepped outside and saw one of the birds come up with his scarf. I guess they thought it was some sort of fur.” He shook his head. “Poor kid. I hope he makes it.”

  “Someone drove past your windows and you heard and saw nothing?”

  “They didn’t necessarily drive past the house, Major. See those trees down there? There’s a rough track along the creek bank.”

  “So you know about that track, do you?” Dwight asked with a sardonic lift of his eyebrow. “That’s how you found that woman’s body, right?”

  “Now, Bryant. I thought I satisfied you on that.”

  “Oh, you did,” Dwight drawled. “You certainly did.”

  CHAPTER

  21

  While remaining on the lookout for food, vultures are equally attuned to their fellow vultures. They note when others’ behavior indicates the discovery of a food source, and will flock to the area.

  —The Turkey Vulture Society

  Friday morning (continued)

  Major Bryant,” Deputy Richards called. “Look!”

  Between the slab and the thick young pines, a short stretch of dead grass and weeds clearly showed that something had recently passed that way and bent the stems to the ground. A vehicle had driven up to the slab, then circled around to leave the way it had come.

  Deputy Denning had arrived with the crime scene van before the paramedics moved young Harper onto a stretcher; but by then, the ground there was too thoroughly trampled to yield usable tracks even had there been any. Now he walked over with his camera to try and document the ones Richards had noticed. Unfortunately, there were no apparent tread marks in the grass that would help identify the tires.

  “I’ll backtrack, see if I find anything useful,” he told Dwight and headed slowly down through the trees, carefully staying to the side, his eyes alert to any stray cigarette butt or scrap of trash that might be found.

  Dwight watched pessimistically. Any tire tracks Denning might find could well be his own. He had driven through from the dump site in his own truck after Rebecca Jowett’s body was found over there on Wednesday. He said the same when that officer returned with pictures from three different tires.

  By then, he had called Anne Harald and asked her to let the Harper boy’s mother know that her son was on his way to Western Wake. As a journalist, she immediately launched into the five Ws—who, what, when, where, why?—but he had a few Ws of his own.

  “Where did he go when he left you yesterday? Who was he going to meet?”

  “He didn’t say, Dwight. I assumed he was going home. Back to Dobbs. He did seem in a hurry to leave, but I think that was because Martin smelled like rotten skunk. One of those buzzards had vomited on him and it was rather disgusting, to say the least.”

  “Did he mention any enemies? Anybody he might have fought with?”

  “I only met the kid Wednesday after Deborah agreed to let us set up a community service project for him, so I barely know him and I certainly don’t know who might have wanted to hurt him. Where was he found?”

  “I’ll get back to you,” Dwight said and ended the call.

  “My cousin couldn’t help?” asked Martin Crawford, who had lingered within earshot.

  “What about you?”

  “I wish I could,” the Englishman said, “but as Anne must have told you, I met the lad for the first time when she brought him by yesterday. I doubt if they were here an hour. She thought I could inspire him to build a career with his photography skills, but he seemed bored by what I had to say and I’m on a tight deadline with my article, so we agreed I couldn’t help. Do you suppose this has anything to do with the dead woman?”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Two bodies dumped in roughly the same area? It would be quite a coincidence, wouldn’t it?”

&nb
sp; “Coincidences happen,” Dwight said mildly. “Speaking of coincidences, would you mind explaining your interest in our little local airstrip?”

  “My interest?”

  “You’ve been spending quite a bit of time out there. The locals have seen you on several occasions.”

  Crawford looked puzzled. “Really? I’ve driven around the area to look for roadkill and to test the limits of how far the vultures will follow my truck now that they associate it and me with food, but I wasn’t aware of favoring any one particular spot.” He smiled and pointed overhead where a distant buzzard was only a winged dot against the sky. “That one always seems to know when I’m outside. It’s rather amusing actually. I stopped to buy a few supplies at that supermarket down the road and two of them perched on the roof to wait for me to come out. I hope no one interprets that as a commentary on the freshness of the food inside.”

  Dwight was halfway to the hospital before he realized that Crawford had not asked what he meant when he said “speaking of coincidences.”

  Mrs. Harper and her mother were in the ICU waiting room. Both women were anxious and distrait and neither could offer a theory as to why Jeremy had been hurt and left for dead.

  “He’s not a popular kid,” said Marcie Harper, who was as tall and skinny as her son with a slightly tamer version of the boy’s silver-blond curls. “But no one ever picked on him as long as Steve was around.”

  “Steve?”

  “His brother,” Mrs. Harper’s mother said. Whereas her daughter and grandson were tall and thin, she was short and stocky, with flat dark hair worn in a modified mullet. “He was killed in Iraq three years ago.”

  Boxes of tissues were scattered around the room and Mrs. Harper blindly reached for one. “Jeremy’s all I have left.” Tears rolled down her cheek. “I can’t bear to lose him, too.”

  “Marcie?”

  Although the women were dressed in tailored office clothes—Dwight later learned they both worked for the state in adjacent government buildings behind the capitol—the man who diffidently approached wore khaki trousers and shirt and a denim windbreaker with his name and the logo of an oil company stitched on the left breast pocket. Mid-forties, with thinning brown hair, he paused a few feet away as if unsure of his welcome.

  “They just called me,” he said. “Is he going to be all right?”

  Mrs. Harper’s mother bristled protectively. “Like you care, Frank?”

  “He’s my son, too, Ida,” he said quietly and turned to his ex-wife. “Marcie?”

  “They don’t know,” she said, her voice breaking. “They’re working on him, but they haven’t told us anything yet. His head—he could be paralyzed or permanently brain-damaged…oh, Frank!”

  He opened his arms to her and she went without hesitation, weeping on his shoulder as he held her tightly.

  Dwight left them and asked a nurse to direct him to the hospital’s security chief. After explaining the situation, he said, “We don’t know why someone wanted to kill him, we don’t even know if they did. It could still be an accident and the person panicked and dumped him, thinking he was dead.”

  The security chief saw where Dwight was going. “You’re asking us to keep an eye on him on the off chance that someone will try to finish the job?”

  Dwight nodded.

  “Don’t worry, Major. Long as he’s in ICU, only family members will be able to get in and he’ll be under someone’s eye all the time.”

  When he got back to the waiting room, the Harper family had been joined by Richard Williams, whose calm good humor comforted Jeremy’s grandmother, who still seemed to resent her ex-son-in-law’s presence.

  An anxious Anne Harald was there, too, and she pounced on Dwight immediately. “Was this something to do with his trouble out at that rendition airport?”

  Until then, he had almost pushed the incident at the Clarenden Motel to one side of his mind. Even though there was no way she could have heard about that pilot’s death, Anne’s question brought it front and center and she seemed to sense the difference.

  “Does it?” she pressed him.

  “I don’t know,” he answered, “but it’s certainly something to think about.”

  He left his card with the Harpers and asked them to call if they thought of anything, no matter how trivial, that might explain the attack on Jeremy.

  A half hour later, he was seated in the principal’s office at West Colleton High.

  His mother was distressed to hear about the attack on one of her students, but she had her secretary pull his records and she sent for the yearbook advisor who had worked with Jeremy most closely.

  Neither woman could suggest a reason for anyone to hurt Jeremy.

  “He doesn’t have a lot of friends, but I can’t say he has any enemies either,” said the advisor, who had once sat behind Dwight in freshman algebra. “As your mom told you, his brother’s camera seemed to give him focus, no pun intended.”

  “Freshman year was hard on him,” Emily Bryant said. “His brother’s death, his parents’ divorce, losing their house here and having to move over to Dobbs. He blamed his dad for everything even though the poor man got downsized from his office job and was out of work for months. I think he was still coming to terms with all that.”

  Dwight’s former classmate nodded. “Like most kids, there’s never enough money for all the electronic toys they think they need. He was particularly hot to get a more powerful computer with the latest software for editing his pictures, and once his father found a job, Jeremy thought he ought to make good on all the missed child-support payments by buying him one.”

  Yes, they knew about his affiliation with Patriots Against Torture and they did not question the sincerity of his commitment, but all he had done was march and protest. His arrest for trespassing was the most confrontational thing he’d done, and even that carried no personal animus for anyone unless it was Deputy Tub Greene, another of Miss Emily’s former students.

  “Tub does like wearing that uniform,” she said dryly.

  Back at the office, Dwight sent for Tub Greene. While he waited, he dispatched a deputy to talk to the PAT people over in Kinston and had McLamb brief him on the status of Rebecca Jowett’s murder.

  “No progress,” McLamb said. “We’re still waiting on the DNA results. Wesley Todd’s alibi checks out. He set traps out there in Creekside Saturday night and the first set of traps were retrieved early the next morning.”

  “First set?” Dwight asked.

  “Yeah, his wife set out fresh ones Sunday morning and caught two more, according to the customer. Right now, they’re rat-free and ready to give a testimonial to the Todds for prompt and efficient service.”

  “What about Becca Jowett’s other client, Paul Kendrick?”

  “Again, nothing to link him till we get the DNA tests back. He may have screwed her, and his wife’s alibi for him is flimsy, but I think it’s sincere.”

  At least Richards was able to tell him that Deputy Sam Dalton had made an arrest in the arson case on their plate. As they had suspected, the property owner was upside down on his mortgage and had torched the place for the insurance.

  Tub Greene seemed bewildered by Dwight’s request to account for his movements from four o’clock the afternoon before, but he answered promptly that he had gone off duty at four, then he and his girlfriend had driven over to Chapel Hill for dinner and the ball game. He did turn a little pink when saying that it had been a late night.

  Dwight grinned. “Like till daybreak?”

  “Will that be all, Major?” Tub asked, turning even redder.

  Bo Poole passed by his open door as Greene was leaving.

  “You eat yet?” the sheriff asked.

  Dwight looked at his watch. Nearly 2:30. No wonder his stomach was rumbling. He should have taken his mother up on her offer of a tray from the school’s cafeteria.

  They drove over to a chicken place and Dwight finished briefing his boss as they sat at a Formica-topped table wit
h a basket of biscuits and fried chicken between them.

  “Your turn now, Bo,” he said to the small-sized man with the outsized personality. “How come the attorney general turned that accident over to the FBI?”

  “Why’s the sky blue? Why’s water wet?” Bo said. “It is what it is, Dwight. We all know the CIA calls the shots out there at the airstrip. It stinks that they send men to be tortured overseas, but the AG can’t buck them any more than I can buck him. Ours not to reason why they don’t want us investigating an accidental death.”

  He dipped his biscuit in his side dish of gravy and looked at Dwight with shrewd brown eyes. “Unless it’s not an accident?”

  “Our ME thinks his neck was broken here.” Dwight touched the back of his own neck, high on the nape. “Takes a hell of a concentrated force to do that, Bo.”

  “He could have fallen on the side of the tub.”

  “True. Except that he was lying on his back as if he’d fallen straight back. You saw the way that tub sloped down. Hard to land on your neck with that much force. You might bang your head, but your arms and shoulders would normally break your fall.”

  “What else?” Bo asked.

  “He had one torn fingernail and the rest of them were cut down to the quick and looked like they’d been scrubbed with his toothbrush or something, but I didn’t see any nail clippings and the plastic liner from the bathroom wastebasket was gone.”

  “Somebody making sure there was nothing under the dead man’s nails that could tie him to the scene?”

  “Or he could have given himself a manicure in front of the TV with all the clippings buried in the rug,” Dwight said. “We’ll never get a chance to look for ourselves, and I doubt if Agent Pritchard’s gonna tell us.”

  Bo Poole leaned back in his chair and his wise brown eyes crinkled with cynical amusement. “Well, now, there’s more than one way to rob a henhouse, ol’ son. And I bet we both know a few black snakes. You talked to Terry Wilson lately?”