The Buzzard Table (14 page)

Thursday night

T
he knock on the door of the motel room came shortly after seven.

“Yeah?”

“Barbecue Pit,” said a muffled male voice.

With his hand on the automatic in his pocket, the man inside said, “Hold it up to the peephole.”

Not that he was going to look. He hated these damn things. Apocryphal or not, the story had gone around a few years back about someone being shot through the eye he’d used to see who had knocked, and he never used one if he could avoid it.

Instead, he pushed aside an edge of the window curtain and peered out.

Reassured by the familiar face of a kid who had delivered to him on his last trip and the logo on the white paper bag the kid was holding up to the peephole, he let the curtain fall, unlocked the door, and handed over a couple of bills.

“Keep the change,” he said expansively.

Although the tip was barely eight percent of the bill, he planned to add his usual twenty percent to this receipt before he turned it in with the rest of his expense chits. They had deep pockets and they never questioned him about small things, but two dollars here, three dollars there—it could add up to a tidy yearly sum. He wasn’t getting any younger and a man had to shore up against retirement, didn’t he?

He popped the top on a can of beer that had chilled in his ice bucket, then removed the lid on the foam take-out plate and felt his mouth water as the aroma of vinegar and roasted pork reached his nose. He had been born in Texas, and grilled beef ribs drenched in a fiery tomato sauce with jalapeño cornbread on the side would always be his favorite, but the chopped pork barbecue of eastern North Carolina and its deep-fried hushpuppies sure ran Texas a close second.

He unwrapped the plastic utensils and napkins and dribbled a packet of Texas Pete over the fragrant meat before turning his attention back to the weather channel on his TV screen. They had planned for him to refuel here and fly on to Maine tonight, but a vicious little ice storm up there had closed the Bangor airport so he’d been ordered to wait it out till morning.

A secure bunkhouse occupied a corner of the hangar here, but it didn’t have television and it didn’t have beer and he sure as hell didn’t feel like listening to the moans and curses of the prisoner he was ferrying up from Gitmo. The medic refused to give him another knockout shot till they were ready to put him back on the plane tomorrow morning.
Been up to me
, thought the man,
I’d have given him a knockout shot to the head with a monkey wrench
.

He devoured a crispy hushpuppy in one bite, then picked up the remote and clicked over to a basketball game. According to the announcer, Duke had a good chance to win the NCAA championship this year.

Shortly before ten, Martin Crawford crossed the motel parking lot and moved silently along the side to the room number the clerk had given him. He had already checked that there was no security camera on this side, only on the reception area. Nevertheless, before putting his ear to the door, he kept his hat pulled down and his scarf pulled up until he had unscrewed the overhead lightbulb with a gloved hand. From within came an announcer’s excited voice and the televised roar of a sports event.

A tiny crack in the curtain let him see the whole room: a rumpled bed, a handgun on the nightstand beside it, and a glimpse of movement in the bathroom beyond.

He’s getting fat and sloppy
, Crawford thought to himself as he picked the lock. He was prepared to kick the door in if necessary, but to his surprise, the man had also neglected to put the safety latch on. In three steps, Crawford had crossed to the gun and dumped its clip onto the floor.

A moment later, the man walked out of the bathroom, bare-assed, still damp from his shower, toweling his hair dry.

“Guess what, Al?” Crawford said. “Your pals didn’t quite kill me after all.”

Dwight Bryant—Friday morning

T
he first call came at 8:07, only minutes after Dwight got to the office and poured himself a cup of coffee.

“Major Bryant? Dwight? It’s Anne Harald. I’m sorry to bother you so early, but Mrs. Harper called and she’s worried. She says Jeremy didn’t come home last night.”

“Who?” Dwight asked.

“Jeremy Harper. One of your mother’s students. He was arrested for trespassing out at the little county airport. Richard Williams and I are supposed to be monitoring his community service.”

“Oh yeah, Deb’rah told me about that.”

“We both left my cousin Martin’s place a little after four yesterday and no one seems to have seen him since. She’s called everyone she can think of. I just wondered if you’d heard anything?”

“Sorry,” Dwight told her. “But teenage boys aren’t noted for telling their mothers where they’ll be every minute. He probably spent the night with friends and will show up at school this morning.”

“Well, maybe,” Anne said doubtfully. “But if you hear anything…?”

“I’ll call you,” he promised.

Sigrid was not a morning person, but the aroma of full-bodied coffee and Martha’s made-from-scratch cinnamon rolls had rousted her from bed, and she entered the dining room in time to hear the end of Anne’s call to Dwight.

“The Harper boy’s missing?” she asked as she filled a cup from the silver urn on the sideboard.

“His mother thinks so.” Anne bit into a soft warm roll that oozed with vanilla icing. “I just hope it’s teenage thoughtlessness and that he’s not sticking his nose in things that don’t concern him.”

Following her mother’s train of thought, Sigrid said, “Like that woman they found out near Martin’s place?”

Anne nodded. “If he got it in his head to investigate on his own…”

Her voice trailed off in uncertainty and concern.

Sigrid immediately thought of the homicide Dwight and Deborah had stumbled into when they were in New York last month. A boy had gone missing in that case, too, and his mother’s pain was too fresh in her mind to let her tell Anne not to worry. “Have another cinnamon bun,” she said.

The second call was a 911 logged in at 10:14. An accidental death out at the Clarenden Arms Motel on Highway 48 near Cotton Grove. A man had slipped in the bathtub and managed to break his neck.

“On our way,” Dwight said.

Twenty minutes later, he stood in the bathroom with the local medical examiner and stared down at the nude body of a middle-aged, well-nourished white male who looked as if he had fallen backwards into the tub while standing under the shower and hadn’t moved since.

Richards came to the doorway holding a wallet in her gloved hand. “According to his driver license, he’s Frank Alexander, fifty-three. From McLean, Virginia. The manager says he’s a private pilot who’s stayed here before.”

Dwight nodded and turned back to the ME, who lived in Cotton Grove and had arrived several minutes before them. “In a fall like this,” he said, “you usually just get a partial break. Looks to me like his neck snapped like a stick, almost as if he went over backwards and banged his neck on the edge of the tub without trying to break his fall. If it’s between the C-2 and C-3 vertebrae, that would cause almost instant death. We’ll know better when we take a look at his neck.”

“Time of death?”

“Too soon to know. No rigor, but that doesn’t mean much. The maid said the shower was still on when she came in to clean the room at ten. As soon as she found him, she called the manager, who turned it off. Warm water, so it’s hard to get an accurate reading of his temperature. Cleanest corpse I ever saw.” He gestured to a nail clipper on the sink. “One fingernail torn into the quick, the rest trimmed down to the nub. You can bag his hands, but I can guaran-damn-tee you there’s nothing there.”

Dwight automatically scanned the bathroom floor but saw no nail clippings. The wastebasket was empty, too, not even the usual plastic liner.

“Any defense marks?”

“None that I can see. No sign of a struggle either unless you count the torn nail, and that could have happened earlier. Right now, I’d call it an accident pure and simple.”

He half turned the body so that Dwight could see where the blood had pooled in the man’s buttocks. “And that reminds me. You’ll be getting the report in the next couple of days on the Jowett woman.”

“Any surprises?” Dwight asked as his eyes roamed the bathroom.

“Naw. What you saw was what we got. Two strong blows to the head. We found her facedown, but her butt looked just like this, too, so she was moved.”

“Well, we knew she wasn’t killed out there at the dump.”

Dwight stepped back into the bedroom just as Deputy Richards lifted a greasy white bag from the wastebasket. The stiff paper crackled when she opened the bag with her gloved hands. “Looks like he had a couple of beers and takeout from the Pit,” she said. “Want me to run by and ask?”

“We’ll do that,” someone said.

Dwight turned and saw a tall black man who filled the outside doorway. Two equally large white men were directly behind him. “And you would be?” he asked mildly.

“FBI,” the man said and held up his badge. “Agent Sherman Pritchard. Mr. Franklin was one of ours.”

“Franklin?” Richards looked at him dubiously. “His driver license says Alexander. Frank Alexander.”

Agent Pritchard just smiled. “Right. Like I said. One of ours.”

Dwight’s own boss edged around the big men. “Sorry, Dwight. I had a call from the AG himself. It’s theirs now.”

Despite the departmental budget crunch, Sheriff Bowman Poole was not one to give up jurisdiction lightly. That he was turning this over to the feds without a fight must mean that strong words had come down from above.

Acknowledging the inevitable, Dwight nodded. “Fine. You’ll share the results of your investigation with us?”

“Anything pertinent?” the FBI agent said. “Absolutely.”

“Don’t hold your breath,” Bo Poole muttered to Dwight as they headed back to their respective vehicles.

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.”