Rituals of the Season

by Margaret Maron

  Her voice trailed off. She tucked a strand of light brown hair behind her ear. Beneath her watchband, a tendril of tattooed flowers encircled her wrist so daintily that it was almost unnoticeable. On this chilly day, she wore brown corduroy gauchos, high-heeled brown leather boots, a man-styled white shirt, and a bright yellow zip-front sweater. There was a simple gold stud in one earlobe, a cluster of small gold bells cascaded from the other.

  “Boyfriends?” asked Richards.

  “Well, there’s an attorney over in Widdington that I’ve gone out with a time or two, but—”

  “Not you. Her.”

  “Oh. Well, yes. I guess. Don’t ask me who, though, because she never talked to me about him, but I think they might’ve been having a fight because last Monday we came in and there was this jeweler’s box on her desk and when she opened it, it was a gold-and-turquoise bracelet that matched some earrings someone—maybe him?—gave her for her birthday in October. She went ballistic about it. I mean, if it’d been a dishwasher or something, I could understand. My dad gave my mom a dishwasher for one of their anniversaries and she didn’t speak to him for like six weeks. But this was jewelry, for pete’s sake. In her colors. She really liked turquoise, you know?”

  “She got mad because he gave her jewelry?”

  “Yeah.” Walsh grinned. “Maybe she really wanted a dishwasher.”

  “Wait a minute. You said the box was here on her desk? How did it get here?”

  The young ADA looked blank. “I never thought about that. It was just there. Gee. Somebody in our office?”

  Richards could almost see her brain working as it ran through her colleagues here in the DA’s office.

  “No, I don’t think so. Somebody would’ve said something. Maybe one of the attorneys in town? They’re in and out all the time.”

  “I don’t suppose you noticed the box? What store it came from?”

  “Sorry. It’s not like she passed it around. The only reason I saw it at all was because I was standing right here when she found it.”

  Richards shoved a pad and pen toward her. “Can you draw what it looked like?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Hesitantly, Julie Walsh sketched a wide silver cuff. “And there were like little rectangles of turquoise spaced along the edge.” She indicated the stones with small dashes. “It might’ve had more but I didn’t get a good look. She barely looked at it herself before she snapped the lid closed again. She didn’t put it on then and I never saw her wearing it. Maybe she gave it back?”

  All during this time, Richards had been trying variations of the previous passwords. She jotted down yet another sequence of numbers after M-E-I, keyed them in, hit the enter key, and suddenly an alphabetized directory of files filled the screen.

  “Oh wow!” said Walsh. “You did it.”

  Richards ran the cursor up and down the rows. She opened Johnson’s computerized address book and skimmed through it, but nothing leaped out at her. It read like the courthouse directory: names, addresses, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses of attorneys, ADAs, deputies, and highway patrol officers that she’d worked with. Richards’s own name was there. So was Major Bryant’s.

  And Judge Knott’s.

  Some of the names had personal data entered in the notes section—birthdays, children’s names, alternate phone numbers. Judge Knott’s had “marrying DB 12/22.”

  Unbidden came the fresh memory of the way the two had looked at each other last night. Richards’s heart wrenched as she recalled the easy familiarity with which the judge had touched the major’s hair, had held his hand, had fitted herself into the crook of his arm as they left Jerry’s.

  Nothing to do with you, she scolded herself silently and set the computer’s parameters to print out the whole address book, notes and all, then went back to scanning the folders.

  In a file labeled “Medical,” she found the names and addresses of Johnson’s ob-gyn and Mei’s pediatrician along with a log of office visits, copayments, and reasons for the visits. Nothing unusual for either of them.

  Nor was her e-mail account for this computer difficult to open. Again, all the messages seemed to pertain to her job here.

  Going up one level, she discovered one more folder lurking among the system files. It was labeled “Personal.” To her dismay, it was protected by a different password and none of the MEI variations seemed to work.

  “Maybe she used her own name,” suggested Julie Walsh, who had been watching over her shoulder.

  Richards tried the usual combinations. Nothing.

  Frustrated, she pushed back in the chair and looked up at the younger woman. “Did she ever mention Martha Hurst to you?”

  “Not really. I heard her ask one of the clerks to pull the files on it, though.”

  Nearing retirement, gray-haired, and carrying seventy pounds over what he’d weighed when he first joined the department right before Bo Poole got himself elected, Deputy Silas Lee Jones reflected that it was a fine howdy-do when you had to ask witnesses if they’d seen something you couldn’t rightly describe yourself.

  Cell phones he understood, but Palm Pilots?

  “What the hell’s a Palm Pilot?” he asked plaintively after Major Bryant tracked him down at the coffee machine and gave him the assignment.

  Castleman and Jamison explained all the things one could do with it.

  Jones gave a disgusted snort. “Sounds like more trouble than it’s worth,” he said as he dialed the first name on the list collected at the crash site Friday night.

  “No,” said the witness. “I didn’t notice a Palm Pilot, just her cell phone. It was in a holder on the dash, right next to that poor woman’s head. Front end smashed to hell and gone and the light was still on in the charger.”

  “Oh crap,” Jones said to the others. “One of those bastards stole her cell phone, too.”

  The clerk was forty-four and fighting it. She was rail thin, her hair an artful strawberry blond, and her pink eye shadow matched the pink of the long-sleeved silk blouse she wore with formfitting black slacks and stacked shoes.

  “Martha Hurst? Oh, yes. She asked me to pull the files last week. Some third-year law student at Eastern was reviewing the case for his law clinic.”

  “You know his name?” asked Richards.

  The clerk frowned in concentration. “Norman? Newton? No, that’s not right. Something like that, though.”

  Richards sighed. Well, how many third-year law students at Eastern with a name like Norman or Newton could there be?

  Jack Jamison stood to stretch his arms over his head and flex his shoulders after two hours hunched over the phone bills and his computer screen. Jones had finished talking to everyone who answered the phone and had gone out for a smoke. Jamison looked through the windows to the opposite squad room where Castleman labored over his own computer screen. He started to call to him, then vetoed the idea. Instead he gathered up the bills and notes he’d made and walked down to Major Bryant’s office. The door was ajar and when he cleared his throat, Bryant looked up.

  “Talk to you a minute, sir?”

  “Sure, Jack. What you got?”

  “Well, it might not mean anything. I mean, there was a logical reason for them to talk, but this much?”

  He laid Tracy Johnson’s cell phone bills on the desk before his boss and pointed to the lines he’d highlighted. “Look at the times, sir. Some of these calls are pretty late at night.”

  At that moment, Bo Poole stuck his head in the door. “What’s up with Whitley? He’s not answering his pager and Doug Woodall’s all over my ass about him.”

  “I’ll put out an APB right away,” said Dwight.

  “APB?” The sheriff started to laugh, then realized Dwight wasn’t joking. “A little extreme, don’t you think? We don’t need to treat him like a criminal just because he flubbed a briefing.”

  “Yeah, I think we do,” Dwight told him.

  “Hey, Major?”

  Mike Castleman spoke over Bo Pool
e’s shoulder. His jaw was clenched and his voice was tight.

  “Later,” said Dwight.

  “No, sir. I’m sorry, sir, but you need to come look at my computer right now.”

  They followed him to his desk in the empty squad room.

  “I was catching up on my messages and there’s one from Whitley.”

  He moved the mouse, clicked it, and a message dated the night before appeared on the screen.

  Sorry, pal, but I can’t do this anymore. Wish there was another solution, but there isn’t. Don

  Grim-faced, Bo Poole turned to Dwight. “Do it,” he said. “Now.”

  CHAPTER 13

  We must work for our heavenly peace on earth. The mental discipline, to prosper, must be aided by divine grace, but it must spring from our own hearts.

  Florence Hartley, The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette, 1873

  Here in eastern North Carolina weather forecasters get downright giddy at the faintest possibility of snow; and the closer we get to Christmas, the more they massage their satellite photos to show how a system that could maybe—maybe—bring possible flurries might actually hang around long enough to blanket us by the twenty-fifth. Despite the hopeful chatter on television last night, we almost never get snow in December, but freezing rains were a distinct possibility. In the belief that the tires of rush-hour traffic would help keep the main roads from turning into sheets of greased glass, Dwight made me promise before I left home Monday morning that I’d head on back as soon as I adjourned court.

  On the drive down to Makely, my mood was almost as bleak as the cold gray clouds that filled the sky. It wasn’t just gloomy thoughts about Tracy, Mei, and the unborn baby either.

  I was due to testify in superior court sometime today in the trial of a former colleague. I usually have reliable instincts about people, but Russell Moore had foxed a lot of people besides me. He was a big, good-natured country boy who’d pulled himself up by his own bootstraps, worked his way through college, went to law school at night, then, spurred on by the grinding poverty of his childhood, opened a one-man practice in Makely, determined to succeed. He played hard, but he worked hard, too, and was particularly good with juries, who tended to trust him implicitly. Hell, we all did. And why not? He was just like an overgrown Saint Bernard puppy, still something of a farmboy, awed by how far he’d come from the tobacco fields. But then he did an out-of-court settlement with an insurance company on behalf of a client.

  A hundred-thousand-dollar settlement.

  Only he didn’t tell his client.

  By the time he was indicted, he’d made at least three more similar settlements. That wasn’t how he got caught, though. He got caught because he forged my name on a DWI judgment that allowed his middle-class client to get a restricted license. Said client was so happy that he could continue driving himself back and forth to work that he bragged about it in the wrong place, and when another attorney asked for something similar for one of his clients, I pulled the record to refresh my memory and immediately realized that it wasn’t my signature on the form. My courtroom clerk said that wasn’t her signature either.

  Once Russell had drawn attention to himself like that, it took only a cursory examination of his records to discover the embezzlements.

  Disbarred and disgraced, he was now on trial and I was a witness for the State. And yeah, I know that there are very few attorneys up for sainthood—there’s a reason for all those crooked-lawyer jokes—and yes, they’re expected to argue a client’s innocence when, in their heart of hearts, they suspect he’s guilty as hell. They may not be held to the spirit of the law, but they’re damned well supposed to uphold the letter of it.

  There had been little mention of Russell Moore at Saturday night’s dinner. His acts shamed us all, but he’d been arrested back in June, so the nine-days-wonder element had long since dissipated.

  When I got to my own courtroom, I was dismayed to find another white officer of the court and his wife standing before me, red-faced and repentant. Marvin Pittman was a town of Makely policeman, but the SBI had accidently discovered that he was fighting cocks out on his farm. An undercover agent on the trail of some illegal Mexicans suspected of running drugs through the area had gotten himself accepted enough to go along for a drug buy out in the country.

  In addition to rounding up six men dealing the drugs, they had stumbled across the social aspects of the buy—one of the largest cockfighting arenas they’d ever seen. Inside Pittman’s barn were four pens, bleachers, and an announcer’s booth. Pittman’s wife and fourteen-year-old son were even running a snack bar on the side, selling hot burritos and cold beers. Some forty people were arrested there that night and issued criminal summonses.

  In addition to dozens of razor-sharp spurs, leather thongs, and other cockfighting accessories, the SBI had confiscated a half-kilo of coke, eighty-nine hundred dollars in betting money, solid gold prize jewelry worth another couple of thousand, and twenty-six gamecocks.

  The gamecocks were currently residing at the county animal shelter.

  The SBI conceded that the Pittmans had nothing to do with drugs and were technically unaware of the side action. All the same, cockfighting is illegal and they were charged with animal cruelty, selling beer and food without a license, and contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

  Unfortunately, cruelty to chickens is only a Class 2 misdemeanor in North Carolina. Dogfighting is a felony, but not cockfighting. And just for the record, a second offense of animal cruelty other than chickens is a felony, but a second offense of chicken cruelty is still a misdemeanor. Where are North Carolina’s chicken lovers on this? Why aren’t they up in arms?

  Even after all the charges were combined, a thousand-dollar fine and a suspended sentence were about the most I could give him since he didn’t have any prior convictions.

  The wife had a prior DWI, but feeling sorry for their teenage son I suspended any jail time for her on condition that she contribute one hundred hours of work at the county animal shelter and take her son with her for at least fifty of those hours.

  After that, it was almost a relief to be presented with Bullard Morris, a fifty-year-old black man who had appeared before me more than once since I came to the bench. Bull Morris might have been shiftless, but he was usually amiable and philosophical when arrested for shoplifting or public drunkenness. This time, though, he’d been charged with disorderly conduct, and the police officer who testified against him said he’d been loud and profane and belligerently ready to fight when the officer was arresting Morris’s roommate for possession of stolen property.

  After he’d pleaded guilty as charged, I said, “That’s not like you, Mr. Morris. What happened?”

  “I’m sorry, Your Honor. Usually I wake up sober. I reckon I’m not real good at waking up drunk.”

  I gave him court costs and a suspended sentence on condition that he go for yet another alcohol assessment at Mental Health. “You don’t get your drinking under control, you’re liable to wake up shot some morning,” I lectured him.

  He earnestly agreed, but we both knew we’d be meeting like this again.

  A bailiff approached the bench and told me that they were ready for my testimony in superior court, so I recessed for an hour, left my robe hanging in chambers and slipped into a deep green cropped jacket, and hurried down to the larger courtroom, adjusting the collar of my white shirt as I went.

  Zack Young, the best criminal defense attorney in our district and certainly the one I’d retain if I were ever in serious trouble, had agreed to defend Russell Moore. According to courthouse gossip, Zack planned to argue mitigating circumstances—that the embezzlement began as an oversight error in bookkeeping and then escalated when Russell’s widowed mother developed a leaky heart valve and had no insurance for the needed operation. As for the forgery, well, that was just Russell’s well-known empathy for people in embarrassing situations, an empathy developed when he was a gawky hayseed who was jeered at because he drove back and forth
to his night classes at law school in an old rattletrap that was held together with duct tape and baling wire.

  According to Zack, he couldn’t bear to see his client humiliated and reduced to commuting to his white-collar job by motorbike.

  As I entered the courtroom by the side door, I took the nearest seat on a bench directly behind the defense table. I couldn’t see Russell’s face as Zack Young finished up with the witness ahead of me, but he seemed to be staring straight ahead. Zack is good, but I had a feeling that Russell knew he was staring at a few years of hard time. Juries aren’t particularly sympathetic to attorneys who bilk their clients.

  My testimony seemed to be part of the prosecution’s clearing out of the underbrush before they got into the embezzlement part. Brandon Frazier was ADA and his questions were straightforward when I took the stand.

  “Did you remember this case, Judge Knott?”

  “Not specifically.”

  “When did it come to your attention?”

  “When the attorney of another DWI with a similar suspended sentence petitioned for the same judgment as I’d supposedly given Mr. Moore’s client.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “I had a clerk pull the record.”

  “Why was that?”

  “When someone to whom I’ve given a suspended sentence comes up again on the same charge, the original sentence is automatically activated. It would have been improper for me to give him limited privileges. I couldn’t and I wouldn’t. That’s why I had the record pulled to see what was going on.”

  “And yet your signature was on the form?”

  “It had been signed with my name, but that wasn’t my signature.”

  “No further questions,” said Frazier.