The Buzzard Table

by Margaret Maron

  She nodded and signed the form Mayleen Richards gave her, then looked at Dwight expectantly.

  “Involuntary manslaughter?” she asked.

  “Let’s just talk hypothetically first,” he said. “See if that’s a possibility.”

  “If there was no intent to kill, no premeditated intent, I mean? Isn’t that the definition of manslaughter? And doesn’t ‘involuntary’ mean you didn’t know what you were doing could actually kill somebody? Like it was almost an accident?”

  Sigrid was right, Dwight thought wearily. Those police procedurals had a lot to answer for.

  “So when you saw Rebecca Jowett running through what was supposed to be your new neighborhood, you had nothing more in mind than maybe warning her to stay away from your husband?”

  “If I saw her. We’re still talking if, right?” she said brightly. Regaining confidence now, she reached back and pulled the scarf from her ponytail to let her luxuriant fiery red hair fall onto her shoulders and cascade down her back. “If I saw her, yeah, I might’ve been thinking how she came on to Wes and how he probably gave her that hickey and, yeah, I might’ve got her to come inside the house with me. But if I did, it would’ve been to tell her why we weren’t going to buy the house, not to kill her. But then she started—I mean, if she started throwing off on Wes, if she called him a crude redneck and said that we couldn’t walk away from the house without losing our earnest money and I could just suck it up? If she said all that, it could’ve made me lose my temper enough to just smack her with—”

  She paused and twisted her scarf into a thin cord.

  “Smack her with what?” Dwight asked quietly.

  “I don’t know. Whatever I might’ve had in my hand. It’s not like I would have brought one of my hammers in with me. That would be premeditated.”

  “But once she fell back onto the couch and was bleeding, what would you have done? Your husband was due home. Why wouldn’t you just leave her there?”

  “I might’ve been worried about DNA. I might’ve forgotten that it wouldn’t matter if y’all found my fingerprints or my hair or something because I’d been in the house before. I might’ve thought I needed to just make her disappear for so long y’all would never figure out what happened.”

  She threaded the thin silk scarf through her callused fingers, then pulled it free.

  “So you wrapped her up in your plastic sheeting and stashed her in your truck, then let your husband sleep in next morning while you disposed of both the rats and the body,” Dwight said.

  “Yeah, that’s what I might have done. If I’d killed the little bitch.” Her scarf was now wound tightly around one thumb and she gave it a sharp yank.

  Dwight gestured toward the laptop that McLamb had paused on the picture of her pushing the body over the edge of the ravine. “So if Jeremy Harper showed up with those pictures, you might’ve decided he needed to go, too?”

  She leaned forward and peered at the screen. “Who took those pictures anyhow? Somebody in an airplane?”

  When Dwight didn’t answer, she sat back in her chair and began playing with that band of colorful silk again.

  “So do we have a deal?”

  “If those programs you watch are accurate, Mrs. Todd, then you must know it’s the district attorney who decides what you’ll be tried for, not the sheriff’s department.”

  “But you can put in a recommendation, can’t you?”

  Tired of bandying words, Dwight nodded to McLamb. “Take her over to the jail and book her.”

  Ginger Todd gaped at them. “But it wasn’t premeditated. It wasn’t!”

  “I’ll be sure and tell the DA you said that,” he promised.

  CHAPTER

  32

  They are very graceful, many even say beautiful.

  —The Turkey Vulture Society

  Tuesday night (continued)

  The moon, four nights from full, was high in the western sky as Dwight drove home along endlessly branching back roads that were nearly deserted at that hour—deserted, that is, of humans and their vehicles. Every few miles his headlights were reflected in the eyes of a rambling possum or a feral cat crouched in the weeds of a ditchbank. As he drove through the creek bottom near the farm, he slowed to let a fox safely pass in front of him. Had he been going faster, he thought, Crawford’s abandoned buzzards would have had fresh meat for breakfast.

  He had driven even slower than usual, using the time to turn the day’s events over in his mind and uneasy about what the rest of this day might hold. Despite his earlier flip answer to Sigrid, he knew that Deborah was troubled that Martin Crawford hadn’t been arrested nor even officially questioned.

  True, it was the FBI’s case. True, there was no physical evidence to link him to the motel murder; and yes, it was true that he had rescued Anne and her colleague.

  But to condone a cold-blooded murder because the CIA only demoted and reassigned the man who had killed Crawford’s partner and closest friend? Who had almost killed Crawford himself?

  He could live with what he’d done, but could Deborah? Or would this taint what they had together? She was a judge, and while she had skirted close to the letter of the law, she had never actually broken it…except…well, yes, there was that time she stabbed Allen Stancil.

  And he couldn’t help grinning as he remembered how she couldn’t be trusted around an unguarded neon sign. As a teenager, she had stolen a blue guitar, and he’d never heard a clear explanation of how she acquired that OPEN TILL MIDNIGHT sign.

  All the same, taking a life was a hell of a lot different from taking a neon sign. Those were things she’d done before she became a judge and took an oath to uphold the law, an oath he knew she took seriously.

  Except for a light in the kitchen, the house looked dark. Nearly midnight. She was probably already in bed, he thought. Asleep. He had half expected her to call sometime during the evening, but she hadn’t, which made him even more apprehensive. Taking a deep breath, he closed the door of the truck and stepped onto the back porch.

  As he reached for the doorknob, Deborah opened the door. She was still dressed, and without speaking, she went into his arms for an embrace that melded into a long, slow, hungry kiss that he wished would never end.

  Nevertheless, he sensed an underlying uncertainty in her kiss that made him step back and look down into her eyes. “We need to talk.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  Lifting a jacket from a peg beside the door, she joined him in the yard; and as they walked toward the pond, she linked her arm through his, which gave him hope. He found himself remembering another moonlit night down there on the pier, a mild spring night when she was home from hearing a divorce case over in Moore County and getting over a breakup with her latest boyfriend. It had taken all his willpower to keep his hands clasped around his drink, to keep from confessing that he’d loved her for years and wanted to be with her forever.

  Sometime during his drive home, the wind had shifted. Instead of bone-chilling gusts out of the northeast, he felt a flow of warmer air from the west. Overhead, veils of thin clouds scudded across the moon, yet there was more than enough light to let them walk the familiar path without stumbling.

  He told her first about Ginger Todd, of the incriminating pictures Martin Crawford had taken of her with a camera fastened to one of his circling buzzards, and of how Jeremy Harper had copied those pictures and tried to blackmail Mrs. Todd.

  They walked out on the pier and moonlight glistened on the still dark water. She listened without comment when he repeated the conversation he and Sigrid had with Crawford at the airport. He also told her what his former colleague had said about the murdered pilot. “I’m not trying to justify it, Deb’rah, just saying that I know where he’s coming from.”

  “Because you know where he’s been?” There was no judgment in her question. Indeed, it was not really even a question.

  The silence stretched between them.

  “Maybe I should have arrested him or
turned him over to the feds, but…”

  “But it got complicated, didn’t it? Bits and pieces of your own life got caught up in the equation.”

  She started to move away, but he put his hand on her shoulder and turned her back to face him.

  “Do you really want me to tell you what happened in Germany?”

  She returned his steady gaze for a long moment without flinching, then the consciously neutral lines of her face softened in the moonlight.

  “Someday,” she said as she reached up and gently touched his face. “When you’re ready. If you want to.”

  She walked down to the post that Annie Sue and Reese had wired with a switch at Christmas. Red, blue, and yellow lights gleamed through the water off the far end of the pier. The surface above bubbled and foamed, then that silly fountain the kids had installed suddenly shot up into the air, changing colors as the lights revolved.

  He followed and put his arms around her, and when she leaned back against his chest, he knew she was okay with his decision.

  “Cal was out in the garden this afternoon,” she said, fitting her body more closely to his. “He says our peas are coming up.”

  A light breeze ruffled her hair as the wind shifted further to the west.

  It held the promise of rain, the promise of spring.

  APRIL 2011

  Acknowledgments

  My continuing thanks to Rebecca Blackmore, Shelly Holt, John Smith, and Shelley Desvousges, who went to law school and became district court judges so that I didn’t have to. Without their expert knowledge and their willingness to share that knowledge, Deborah Knott could not have been elected dogcatcher.

  Brenda Foldesi, Sharon Woods Hopkins, and Lisa Logan walked me through the process of buying a house in Colleton County.

  Brainstorming sessions with Bren Bonner Witchger, Mary Kay Andrews, Alex Sokoloff, Diane Chamberlain, Katy Munger, and Sarah Shaber—the other six of our Weymouth 7—were indispensable when I wrote myself into a corner with this book and couldn’t get out. And Weymouth itself continues to welcome us twice a year.

  Vicky Bijur, who will be my agent and friend till one of us dies, has been my trusted advisor and support since we were both newbies.

  Deborah Knott Novels:

  THREE-DAY TOWN

  CHRISTMAS MOURNING

  SAND SHARKS

  DEATH’S HALF ACRE

  HARD ROW

  WINTER’S CHILD

  RITUALS OF THE SEASON

  HIGH COUNTRY FALL

  SLOW DOLLAR

  UNCOMMON CLAY

  STORM TRACK

  HOME FIRES

  KILLER MARKET

  UP JUMPS THE DEVIL

  SHOOTING AT LOONS

  SOUTHERN DISCOMFORT

  BOOTLEGGER’S DAUGHTER

  Sigrid Harald Novels:

  FUGITIVE COLORS

  PAST IMPERFECT

  CORPUS CHRISTMAS

  BABY DOLL GAMES

  THE RIGHT JACK

  DEATH IN BLUE FOLDERS

  DEATH OF A BUTTERFLY

  ONE COFFEE WITH

  Non-series:

  BLOODY KIN

  SHOVELING SMOKE

  LAST LESSONS OF SUMMER

  SUITABLE FOR HANGING

  Thank you for buying this e-book, published by Hachette Digital.

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  Or visit us at hachettebookgroup.com/newsletters

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Family Tree

  Somalia—Late 1993

  December

  January

  February

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  April 2011

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Margaret Maron

  Newsletter

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2012 by Margaret Maron

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  All chapter captions are taken from the official website of The Turkey Vulture Society, a nonprofit scientific corporation (http://vulturesociety.homestead.com/), and used by its permission. Its purpose is to promote scientific studies of the life habits and needs of the turkey vulture, to protect the vulture and its habitat, and to inform the public of the valuable and essential services this bird provides to mankind and to the environment.

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  ISBN 978-1-4555-1825-8