Death's Half Acre (13 page)

His smile turned into a mock leer. “
Exactly
the way we used to?”

I leered right back at him, remembering how chaste those evenings had been. “Only this time you can show me what was actually on your mind back then.”

CHAPTER 9

. . . and if there is

a fly nearby, or dust, a blowing curtain,

the sun coming in through the glass, watch it:

that is yours to keep.

—Fiddledeedee,
by Shelby Stephenson

F
RIDAY MORNING

W
alking down the hallway to his office next morning, Dwight eventually realized that all the smiles he was getting probably meant that he had a sappy one pasted on his face.

“Good morning, sir,” one of the deputies said as he passed the squad room.

If he only knew, Dwight thought to himself, savoring the memory of Deborah when he had taken her a cup of coffee an hour or so earlier. No sooner had he handed her the mug than she had carefully placed it on the shelf of their headboard, then pulled him down next to her for a repeat of last night when she had disappeared into their bedroom, ostensibly to pick out a video.

“Need some help deciding which one?” he had called when she didn’t return right away.

“That’s okay. I’ve got it.” A few minutes later, she appeared in the doorway. “
Men in Black
, or me in this?” she asked with a perfectly straight face.

As he felt himself begin to harden, he had laughed and said, “No contest.
Men in Black
, of course.”

“You’re in a good mood this morning,” Bo Poole said. “You and Wilson come up with specifics on Candace Bradshaw yesterday?”

“Nothing worth talking about,” he said. “If she wrote anything down, we haven’t found it yet. Her assistant claims she kept her board membership pretty much separate from Bradshaw Management and says if she took money for her favors, she would’ve considered it more like a perfectly legitimate thank-you gift than a kickback. Richards came up empty on her home computer, too. The Ginsburg twins are going file by file on both computers just to see if she got cute and hid something under an innocuous label, and I’ve asked Danny Creedmore to come in this morning, but I don’t expect to get much out of him until we have something to pry him open with.”

They were still talking when Dwight’s phone rang and a doctor in the medical examiner’s office over in Chapel Hill handed him a crowbar. Because Candace Bradshaw’s death had been tagged a probable suicide, there had been no huge rush to do the postmortem.

“Good thing that whoever found her tore that bag open without disturbing the drawstrings,” the doctor told him. “Soon as I cut the bag away from her neck, it was clear that it didn’t line up with the original marks on her neck. She didn’t die from asphyxia, Bryant. She was strangled first with a thin ligament and then the bag put on.”

“Yeah? Wait a minute while I let Sheriff Poole know.” He pressed the speaker button on the phone base so that Bo could hear. “They’re calling it a homicide, Bo.”

“You sure about that, Doc?” asked Bo. “She didn’t do it herself?”

“Excuse me?” The doctor sounded offended. “I won’t have the full report for another day or two, but I can tell you now that the force was such that one of the rings in her trachea was broken. There’s no way she could have garroted herself from behind and then tied on that bag.”

“What about scratch marks on her neck? Or fingernail scrapings?”

“Sorry. Nothing like that. If she fought her attacker, it’s not evident and her wrists don’t seem to have been tied, although there’s some faint bruising on both arms that could indicate she struggled to get out of some sort of soft restraint—maybe a blanket or a sheet?—and there was a fresh bruise on her right knee for whatever that’s worth.”

“What about a TOD?” Dwight asked.

“Find somebody who can say when she ate a spinach salad with hard-boiled eggs,” the doctor said crisply. “She died about two and a half hours after eating it. Lacking that and only judging by the rigor, time of death could be anywhere from mid-afternoon to midnight.”

“Thanks, Doc,” said Bo and leaned over to switch off the speakerphone. “I better go let Doug Woodall know.”

“I’ll call Terry,” said Dwight. “And I’ll get some people to nail down when she ate that salad.”

“Don’t forget you’ve got Creedmore coming in.”

“I haven’t. You want to sit in on it?”

“I might should,” said Bo. “I always feel better myself when I have a witness to any conversations with ol’ Danny.”

Barefooted, Daniel Creedmore probably stood five-seven, the same as Bo Poole. His tooled leather cowboy boots added an extra inch, though, and his waistline looked to be about four inches bigger. On this mild spring day, he wore a black poplin windbreaker and a maroon shirt that was unbuttoned at the top and tucked inside charcoal-gray slacks. Like Bo, he was mid-fifties and had a friendly open face, shrewd blue eyes, and thinning brown hair. Unlike Bo, he was not someone who immediately commanded attention and he did not possess Bo’s innate easygoing nature, despite telling everyone to call him Danny. It was as if his mama had told him he could catch more flies with honey and he had spent his adult life trying to hide the astringent vinegar that lay just beneath a surface of assumed warmth and friendliness.

“Good to see you, Bo,” he said as he entered Bo’s office and took a chair across from him. “Hey, Bryant. How’s it going?”

“Thanks for coming in,” the sheriff said, “and let me offer my condolences on Candace Bradshaw’s death.”

“Thanks,” Creedmore said blandly, pretending to misunderstand. “The county and the party both have suffered a great loss. We were hoping to put her up for a state office this next cycle.”

“Like you did last time?” asked Dwight.

“That’s right,” Bo said, leaning back in his big padded chair. His blue eyes twinkled. “I did hear that Woody Galloway’s throwing his hat in the governor’s ring.”

Woodrow Galloway was a state senator who would have a tough primary fight for the party’s nomination. Unfortunately, his seat in the General Assembly was up for election this time, too. Two years ago, one of the representatives from the county was in the same position. That’s when it was decided to get Candace Bradshaw to file for his seat. After he lost the nomination he had sought, Candace gallantly withdrew her name in his favor, which was how she became chair of the board.

It was an open secret that they hoped to do the same with Galloway’s slot—that Candace would keep his chair warm in case he lost the primary, which most assumed he would.

Creedmore shrugged. “Would’ve been a little harder this time around. Candace didn’t have much name recognition outside the county, but with enough backing, we thought she was up to it.”

“As you say, a real loss,” said Dwight.

“On a personal level as well, right?” Bo added.

Danny Creedmore’s eyes narrowed. “You want to explain that, Sheriff?”

“I think you know where this is headed,” the sheriff said mildly. “Her name’s been linked to yours ever since you and your friends first ran her for the board. It seems to be fairly common knowledge and I suppose we could document times and places if you make us.”

They locked eyes for a long moment, then Creedmore caved with a rueful laugh and a hands-up what-the-hell gesture of locker-room camaraderie. “Shit, Bo, she was a good-looking woman and who doesn’t like a little strange nookie on the side when you’ve been married long as I have?”

Bo gave an encouraging grin and Creedmore obliged with colorful details on just what a hot little number Candy Bradshaw could be. No man ever knows another man completely, thought Dwight, but he’d be willing to bet everything he owned that Bo had never been with another woman while Marnie was alive.

“Why’d she kill herself?” Bo asked as the other man wound down.

“Now that I couldn’t tell you. Surprised the hell out of me. It was like getting a sucker punch in the gut when they told it yesterday. I hear she left a letter? Don’t suppose you can tell me what was in it?”

“Sorry. Any truth to it?”

Creedmore thrust his hands in the pocket of his black jacket and stretched back in his chair with a smile and a shake of his head. “Good try, Bo.”

“When did you last see her?” Dwight asked.

“It’d been at least a week. To be honest with you, it was sorta cooling off between us. Sexually, I mean. I think she was seeing somebody else and—”

“Who?” said Bo.

“Could be almost anybody, I suppose. Thad Hamilton. One of our representatives. Hell, maybe even Woody Galloway himself.”

Dwight frowned. “But you yourself had no contact with her the week before she died?”

“Didn’t say that, Bryant. I said I hadn’t seen her. We talked almost every day. There was a public hearing on the planning board’s recommendations Tuesday night and she was opposed to them. Wanted to game it with me.”

I’ll just bet she did
, thought Dwight. He glanced inquiringly at Bo and got an almost imperceptible nod. “Who wanted her dead, Creedmore?”

“Huh?” No one ever said that Creedmore made his fortune through dumb luck alone. “You telling me she was killed? She didn’t do it herself?”

“We’d appreciate it if you’d keep that under your hat for a few hours,” Bo said. “But yeah. Someone strangled her.”

“Well, damn!” said Danny Creedmore. They could see the wheels turning behind those shrewd blue eyes. “You talk to her good-for-nothing daughter yet?”

“What do you mean I can’t move back in here?” Dee asked indignantly.

She had appeared at the door of Candace Bradshaw’s new house with her duffle bag, and Special Agent Sabrina Ginsburg and Deputy Mayleen Richards had immediately blocked her entrance.

“This is my mother’s house. I live here and I’m her only child so I probably own it now.” She glared at the two law officers and all but stamped her foot in indignation.

“Unless she left a will, I rather doubt that,” said the blond Ginsburg “twin.” “It’s our understanding that she and your dad were still legally married, so he would be one of her heirs if she died intestate.”

“Whatever. So call him. I’m sure he’d rather I stay here than keep sleeping on his couch, and besides, I need fresh clothes.”

“You really can’t move back in,” Richards told her, thinking that Deanna Bradshaw was acting more like twelve than twenty-two. “You can pick up some of your clothes, but you can’t stay till we finish our investigation.”

While Sabrina Ginsburg went back to checking the files on Candace Bradshaw’s laptop, Mayleen Richards followed the daughter into her messy bedroom next door to the office.

The girl stopped at the doorway and gave a look of distaste at the state of her room. “Oh crap! I guess you’re not letting Sancha in to clean either.”

“That’s right,” Richards said. “While you’re here, though, I need to ask you some questions. You may have been the last one to see your mother alive. Did she give any indication that—”

“—that she was going to put a bag over her head and end it all? No! Okay, we had a fight. She was still pissed that I let a guy stay over last week and we got into it again.”

“What guy?”

“Doesn’t matter. I’ve dumped him. He can’t hold his liquor. Puked all over her new couch.”

“I need his name.”

Rolling her eyes, Dee muttered the boyfriend’s full name and that of his dorm over at Chapel Hill.

“Thanks,” Richards said, writing it on the yellow legal pad she carried. “Was your mother depressed? In some kind of trouble?”

“My dad told me what she wrote.” Dee upended her duffle bag on the bed and began to pull clean lingerie from an open drawer. “But he didn’t believe it and I don’t either. Mom liked her life. She was kicking ass and having fun.”

“Whose ass, Dee?”

“Anybody’s who needed it, I guess. How should I know? I was at school till Easter most of the time.”

“That when she moved in here?”

“No, it was Christmas. She was real big on giving herself presents. New Toyota for her birthday last spring, this house for Christmas. First new house she’d ever lived in. You’d’ve thought it was Buckingham Palace,” she said with all the scorn of someone born to the privilege and status her father’s family had possessed.

“Our old house had been in the Bradshaw family for a hundred years,” Dee said, “and she just walked away from everything there. Sold it all or sent it to the landfill. Even my stuff. The only thing she kept was her dollhouse and her clothes.”

“
Her
dollhouse?”

“You don’t think she ever let me play with it, do you? Mom didn’t like to share. When she was little, I guess her people didn’t have much. She used to talk about the dollhouse she’d seen in a shop window and how she used to wish on the new moon for one, so Dad gave it to her for their tenth wedding anniversary. She was always fiddling with it and buying new stuff for it.”

There was a sudden catch in her voice and Richards realized she was not quite as indifferent to her mother’s death as she would have everyone believe.

“So when did you see her last?” Richards asked gently.

“I don’t know. Tuesday? Around two, maybe? We fought. She said I could go back to school or I could go live with Dad. She made me give her my key as I was leaving, but she was already starting to cool off.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, she was eating a late lunch and watching a history program at the kitchen counter—some guy jumped out of an airplane twenty-five years ago with a bag of diamonds or something.”

“Eating what?” Richards asked.

“One of those grocery deli salads.”

“What kind?”

“Spinach.”

“With hard-boiled eggs?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Depending on how far along digestion was, it helps us establish a time of death.”

“Oh gross!” the girl said, making a face.

“And you’re sure that program was on?”

“Yeah, they were showing pictures of the jewelry and Mom was like drooling over the diamond necklaces.”

After Dee Bradshaw had departed with extra makeup and clean clothes, leaving her dirty ones still piled in a heap on her bed, Richards called to Ginsburg, “You hear that?”