The Buzzard Table (20 page)

Colleton County Sheriff’s Department—
Tuesday morning

W
ith Wes Todd firmly alibied for the time of her death and no other viable candidate in sight until Paul Kendrick returned from Mexico at the end of the month—“Assuming he does come back and we don’t have to issue a warrant for his arrest,” Major Bryant said gloomily—the investigation into Rebecca Jowett’s murder was stalled for the time being, “so let’s get out there and clean up some of this other stuff,” he told his deputies at the morning briefing.

As he reviewed the pending investigations and listened to their updates, they were joined by a tall slender woman in tailored black slacks and a white parka with a turquoise scarf looped around her neck. Her short dark hair was layered in an expensive cut with wisps of bangs that showcased her clear gray eyes. Not a haircut from the Cut ’n’ Curl, thought Mayleen Richards.

“Major Bryant? I was told to come on back, but if I’m interrupting, I can wait elsewhere.”

Not a Southern accent either.

“Come in, Lieutenant,” he said formally as he stood up to welcome her.

Turning back to his detectives, he said, “Y’all, this is Lieutenant Harald of the New York City PD. She gave me a view of her department when I was up there last month, so I asked her in to see how we do things down here.”

He described to her the cases they were working on: the arson they had just wrapped up, the murder of a Realtor, a bank robbery, an armed robbery at a local gas station, some serious vandalism at a local elementary school, and a drug-related shooting. As he finished the briefing, he asked Richards and McLamb to join him in his office.

“Coffee, Lieutenant? We just made a fresh pot.”

She nodded, well aware of the psychological benefits of sharing coffee and how it would help the other two accept her more quickly.

When they were settled with the door closed, Dwight said, “There’s a possibility, a rather strong possibility in fact, that the attack on Jeremy Harper could be connected to his Patriots Against Torture activities and that death out at the Clarenden, so we’re going to have to tread lightly here and not do anything to tick the feds off if we can help it.”

The two deputies shared a glance of surprise that he would speak of this in front of an outsider.

“Lieutenant Harald is up to speed on this,” Dwight said. “I’m sure you both know of her grandmother, Mrs. Jane Lattimore over in Cotton Grove?”

They nodded.

“The lieutenant’s mother was mentoring the Harper kid’s community service. In fact, she may have been one of the last ones to speak to him before he was attacked.”

McLamb lifted an eyebrow at that. “I don’t suppose he happened to mention where he was going?”

“Sorry,” Sigrid Harald said. She glanced at Dwight. “Did you tell them about his jump drives?”

“We aren’t sure about this,” Dwight told them, “but there’s a possibility that the kid copied a computer file that might be connected to that pilot’s death. Whose computer it was isn’t relevant at the moment, but keep an eye out for his jump drives. Mrs. Harald said he had several.”

The Harper house lay in a lower-middle-class neighborhood several blocks west of the county courthouse. Brick ranches sat elbow-to-elbow with white clapboard bungalows on small lots that featured tidy hedges and shared dirt driveways that led to separate single-car garages in the back.

Mayleen Richards and Ray McLamb parked in front of one of the brick ranches with a narrow front porch and were met at the door by Jeremy Harper’s grandfather, whom they had called a few minutes earlier.

While McLamb went around the house to the back where the blue Toyota was parked, Richards went inside.

Early sixties, with frizzy white hair and rimless bifocals that kept slipping down his nose, Gene Turnage was a tubby little man with bright inquisitive eyes and an open smile that probably flashed more readily when he wasn’t worried because his only remaining grandson lay comatose in a Raleigh hospital. He wore khaki pants, a white shirt and tie, and a blue Wal-Mart vest that strained the buttons across his ample belly.

The front door led immediately into a living room crowded with two couches, three lounge chairs, and some mismatched occasional tables. Judging by the different styles and colors, Richards guessed that Jeremy’s mother had brought along some of her own furniture when they lost the house in Cotton Grove. There was a built-in bookcase near the door, jammed with an assortment of family photographs. A younger Mr. and Mrs. Turnage beamed at each other in what was probably a formal anniversary picture. In other snapshots they were joined by their daughter and two little curly-top boys.

The top shelf held a photograph of a young soldier in his dress uniform, a folded American flag in a plastic case, and a framed Purple Heart.

A short hall to the right of the front door led to three bedrooms.

“I hope this won’t take very long,” Mr. Turnage said.

He cast an anxious glance at his watch as he showed her into Jeremy’s room. “It took me a while to get this job after I got laid off at the bread company and I don’t want ’em to think I can’t show up when I’m supposed to.”

“What time does your shift start?” Richards asked.

He pushed his glasses back up. “Not till ten.”

“Oh, we should be out of here way before then,” she assured him.

The bedroom was adequate if cramped and was furnished with a single bed against the outside wall, a nightstand, a chest of drawers, an armless steno chair on casters, and a desk that was nothing more than a narrow flush door supported at each end by wooden shelves. The nightstand held a cheap CD player, and the top drawer was filled with rock groups and country music in equal numbers.

A homemade bulletin board over the desk was layered with memos and photographs of school events. Atop the desk, an older boxy computer shared space with a neat stack of photography magazines, schoolbooks, a pencil jar, and a lidless cigar box full of odds and ends. A printer sat on the floor beside the CPU.

Someone must have tidied up in here, Mayleen thought, remembering the shambles her brothers used to make of their rooms. For the flicker of a moment images of Tom’s indignant face flashed through her head. “
Just stay out of my room, Mayleen!
” was overlaid by Steve’s angry “
You try and bring a Mexican into this family and you ain’t no sister of mine!
”

Resolutely, she continued her visual examination of the room as Mr. Turnage said, “There’s his computer. Just don’t ask me how to turn it on or anything.”

He shook his head with a wry smile and his glasses slid back down his nose. “I’m starting to sound like my dad. When I was a boy, I was the one who knew how to adjust the rabbit ears and fiddle with the horizontal and vertical holds till we got a clear picture. Now Jeremy and his mother have to show me how to record a program or play a DVD. As for computers, he might as well be speaking Chinese when he starts trying to tell me how to look something up. The only reason we got cable was so he could go on the Internet. It’s expensive and we don’t watch that much television, but I guess the kids nowadays need to stay up with things.”

He watched as Mayleen sat down in front of the PC.

“I don’t suppose y’all found his camera?”

“I’m not sure we knew it was missing,” Mayleen said, pressing the power button.

“Maybe no one thought to say, but yeah, when we went to get his car, his camera bag was gone and he always has it with him.”

Mayleen poked through the cigar box. “What about his jump drives?”

“His what?”

“Portable memory sticks.”

When Turnage continued to look at her blankly, she reached into her pocket and pulled out her car keys. Two jump drives were on the chain.

“That what you call them things? Yeah, I think he did have some.” With his index finger, he pushed his glasses back into place and looked around the room with a helpless air. “I don’t know where he keeps them, though.”

He pulled open a dresser drawer and felt around the edges.

“Why don’t you let me do that?” Mayleen said. “His computer seems a little slow to load.”

“Yeah, he’s always complaining about that.” He turned away from the dresser. “How ’bout I fix us all a glass of tea?”

“That would be nice,” Mayleen said encouragingly.

As soon as the older man left the room, she quickly and efficiently checked all the dresser drawers as well as the drawers in the nightstand. She slid her fingers into the pockets of the jackets in his closet, patted down all the slacks and jeans, then looked under the bed and lifted the mattress.

Nothing.

The computer finally came to life and the screen saver was a picture of Jeremy’s brother, dressed in Desert Storm–type cammies as he leaned against a sand-colored Humvee. Although she had only seen Jeremy when he lay wounded and bloody the morning he was found, she noted the resemblance between the two brothers, the same thin necks, the same frizzy blond hair even though the dead brother’s hair was clipped short. Every time Jeremy booted up his computer, this was what he would see, she thought sadly.

With a sigh for all the young men and women who had died or been wounded in this misguided war, she turned back to the task at hand. Happily, the computer did not seem to be password-protected. She went first to the history of websites the teenager had visited. In the week leading up to his attack, they consisted mostly of Facebook pages, Google searches for what might be school subjects, newspaper stories, and some games. He had also looked up the Disabled American Veterans websites, Anne Harald’s Wikipedia entry, and had tried to find a Martin Crawford.

No luck there.

But Crawford? Oh yes, she thought. The guy who had found him. Now how did Jeremy know Crawford?

One of his last searches was of the FAA’s registry, which made sense in light of Major Bryant’s cryptic statement that he might have copied something linked to the FBI’s case. His last search had been the Colleton County yellow pages, but he must not have clicked on anything specific. On the other hand, the phone directory was atop that stack of magazines at the end of the desk.

Mr. Turnage returned with a tall glass of iced tea and Mayleen thanked him as she took a deep swallow. Nice and sweet, just as she liked it.

“I took a glass out to your friend. He doesn’t seem to be finding anything.”

“Does Jeremy have a cell phone?” she asked.

Turnage adjusted his bifocals and shook his head. “It quit working last week and he was saving up to get a new one. Something else this generation’s got that ours didn’t have. When we were kids, we thought the twenty-first century would find us all flying our own personal airplanes. Never dawned on us that we’d cut the cord and carry our phones around in our pockets. Never dawned on us that one phone wouldn’t last you thirty years either. Way Jeremy acted, you’d’ve thought somebody’d cut off his right arm.”

Mayleen smiled and finished skimming through the boy’s email—the usual teenage boy talk. A group message to tell some friends that his phone was fried. “
Bummer.
” A short summary of his day in court and how “that asshole DA doesn’t have a fucking clue as to how this country’s being taken over by those Blackwater supporters.”

Regretfully, Mayleen realized that the computer was no help. “Who straightened up this room, Mr. Turnage? I can’t believe any teenage boy is this neat.”

“Me,” he said. “And you’re right. It was a mess. My wife and daughter have to be in Raleigh at eight-thirty and it’s nearly suppertime before they get home, so since I’m only working part-time, I try to do what I can to help out. I always knew how to cook, but now I’ve learned how to run the washer and the vacuum cleaner.”

She pointed to the phone directory. “Was that on the desk when you started straightening up?”

He shook his head. “No, it was there on the floor right where he left it.”

“Open or closed?”

“Open,” he answered promptly.

“I don’t suppose you noticed where?”

“Sorry. You reckon it was important?”

“Hard to say,” Mayleen told him.

“It was in the yellow pages section, though.”

The Colleton County yellow pages were barely half an inch thick. Turnage picked it up. “Best I can remember, maybe halfway in?”

He riffled the pages. Halfway in meant the H’s—harnesses, health clubs, hearing aids, and heaters.

“No, maybe it was a little bit more than halfway, now that I think about it.” He flipped over several more pages to mulches, music instruction, and nail salons. “Sorry, ma’am. I just can’t say.”

McLamb came inside to search the bedroom a final time, while she went out to run fresh eyes over the car, but if Jeremy Harper had hidden a jump drive in either, they could not find it.

As they drove back to work, Mayleen said, “What about that Crawford guy, Ray?”

“Who?”

“The one who’s staying out there writing about buzzards. The one who found the Harper boy and called it in.”

“What about him?”

“Jeremy Googled him.”

“So?”

“So how’d he know the guy’s name?”

“You think he’s the one Jeremy went to see?”

“Well, the kid was pretty close to being buzzard food, wasn’t he?”

D
wight and I had agreed to meet for lunch at the Landing, a fish house overlooking the river that flows along the southwest side of Dobbs. It’s a bit pricier than the chain restaurants and is seldom crowded for lunch. Fresh seafood is trucked in from the coast every morning and we were both hungry for oysters. On the drive over, I passed Braswell Hardware and noted that the storefront had indeed been given a facelift since I last noticed it. The faded white lettering across the top was now painted in gold that glistened in the sunlight. Inside the show window, someone was dismantling a big heart made of red-handled hand tools while a colorful sandwich board on the sidewalk announced the arrival of seeds for the spring garden.

Go, Mrs. Braswell!
I thought.

I was first at the restaurant, so I went ahead and ordered our drinks. Iced tea for me, water for Dwight, hold the lemon on both. The hostess had seated me at a booth that offered a panoramic view of big white-trunked sycamores along the river. Sunlight sparkled on the muddy brown water, which was still high after all the rain and nearly level with its bank.

When I heard Dwight’s voice and looked up from the menu, I was surprised to see that Sigrid Harald was with him.

“Well, hey,” I said. “Dwight didn’t tell me you were visiting his office today.”

“That’s because you don’t have your phone on,” he said, sliding into the booth beside me.

“I don’t?” I retrieved it from the pocket of my coat and saw that it was indeed switched off. “Sorry. I thought sure I put it on vibrate.”

Dwight rolled his eyes.

I switched it on and immediately saw his text message that Sigrid would be joining us.

“Hope you don’t mind,” she said, taking the opposite seat and removing the white parka I’d seen her wear in New York. Beneath was a white turtleneck sweater, and she left her turquoise scarf loosely tied around her neck. “Martin called Mother this morning and wanted to see her. Alone. So I thought I’d take Dwight up on his offer to show me his department.”

“You should have come up to my courtroom,” I said and told them about the coffeepot case and how that disgruntled employee resented working for a woman. “I guess you must have faced some of that yourself when you took over your homicide squad?”

Sigrid nodded, but did not elaborate as our waitress came to take our orders—steamed oysters on the half shell for Dwight, lightly fried oysters for me, grilled sea bass for Sigrid, accompanied by salads and cornbread squares heavily laced with onions.

“What’s the proportion of sworn female officers in your department?” she asked Dwight.

“Less than twenty-five percent,” he admitted, “but Deborah will tell you that I talk it up every time I speak at a high school career day or to the criminal justice classes out at our community college.”

“I’m afraid it’s still seen as a guy thing,” I said. “And the pay’s not enough to tempt many adventurous young women. Take my niece. She just broke up with her latest boyfriend because he didn’t approve of her job.”

“What does she do?”

“She’s an electrician,” Dwight said. Annie Sue’s expertise delights him, and he told a couple of family stories, including the time she was grounded and spent her enforced house arrest rewiring the wall switches so that none of them turned on the expected lights. “She was thirteen at the time and now she has her own truck and her own set of tools.”

He hesitated and a slight frown crossed his face.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing. For a moment there…ever get the feeling you’re about to remember something important and then it’s gone?”

Sigrid nodded. “More often than I’d prefer. I think it comes from trying to fit too many pieces together from too many possibilities.”

“Annie Sue? Electricians?” I prompted. “Tricks?”

He shook his head. “It’s gone.”

Our food came and talk turned back to Martin Crawford and Anne Harald’s narrow escape in Somalia.

“I knew she’d had a close call back then,” Sigrid said, “but nothing like what she told us last night. I was studying for my sergeant’s exam around that time so I guess I wasn’t paying enough attention. Besides, she always downplayed any danger and said I put myself in harm’s way more often than she did.”

I tried to take a square of cornbread from the basket. It was so tender that it crumbled in my fingers and I had to use a fork to transfer it to my plate, but it was worth the effort, buttery and savory at the same time.

Sigrid followed my example and seemed surprised by how delicious cornbread could be. “Mother keeps taking me to places that serve deep-fried hushpuppies with the texture of dried-up oatmeal.”

“Not enough self-rising flour,” I said.

She gave me a blank look. “I’m not much of a cook. Besides, my housemate—”

She was interrupted by the ringing of Dwight’s phone. He checked the screen and said, “Sorry. I need to take this. It’s Richards.”

As he walked away, I said, “Did you meet Deputy Richards?”

She nodded.

“Now there’s a case of another woman who bucked her family tradition.” I described how Mayleen had left a good computer-related job in the Research Triangle to join the sheriff’s department despite her father’s strongly voiced opposition.

“Any luck?” Sigrid asked when Dwight rejoined us.

“Nothing on his computer and no sign of any jump drives in the house or his car,” he said and explained to me that he’d sent Richards and McLamb out to Jeremy Harper’s house that morning. “His camera case is missing, though, and so is his camera. But his grandfather said he’d left the phone directory open to the yellow pages. Richards thinks he looked up a business just before leaving the house.”

“No scrap of paper with cryptic notations?” I asked, only half facetiously.

“No, but he did Google Anne and got her Wikipedia entry and some of the web citations. She said he tried to Google Martin Crawford as well and how did Jeremy know his name.”

I was curious. “You didn’t tell them about Martin? How did you explain the copied computer file?”

“I just said it might be something connected to the FBI’s case and I was keeping it on a need-to-know basis for the time being.”

“What
about
the FBI?” Sigrid asked. “Will you tell them?”

“Anything I have is only speculation based on what Anne told us. Hearsay. Would you?”

“Not my case,” she replied.

“Mine either,” he said and gestured to the waitress for more water.

I was troubled by the mixed signals I was getting from them. We’re all three officers of the court, sworn to uphold the law. In the normal run of things, wouldn’t they bring Crawford in for questioning? Ask for alibis? Probe for a connection to the victim?

Dwight had always seemed like an open book without footnotes. Now it was as if some of his pages were written in Urdu and I realized that I couldn’t read him as well as I always thought I could, that there seemed to be things in his past that made him unwilling to cooperate with the feds or to cast suspicion on Crawford, things that might have more to do with his own personal history than with how Anne was rescued twenty years ago.

(“
And what about the things Dwight doesn’t know about you?
” whispered my internal preacher.)

(His pragmatic roommate nodded. “
Before you sit in judgment, you gonna tell him exactly how you were first appointed to the bench?
”)

Conflicted, I steered the conversation into safer waters. “What about Becca Jowett’s murder? Any progress there?”

“That Realtor I told you about,” he said to Sigrid. To me, he said, “Another brick wall, I’m afraid. Her husband has a watertight alibi and so does our first suspect, the one with a hair-trigger temper who cheats on his wife yet wants to keep his marriage. The other guy she was getting it on with has taken his wife to Mexico for the rest of the month. His alibi’s not as tight, but we’ll have to wait till they get back before we can tackle their stories again.”

Wife? Alibis?

“Annie Sue’s truck!” I exclaimed.

“What about it?” Dwight asked.

“Does Wes Todd’s wife have a truck, too? Is that what you almost remembered before?”

Dawning comprehension spread across his face. “Well, damn!” he said, and kissed me there and then to Sigrid’s amusement.

“This is why I keep her,” he said. “How the hell could I have overlooked that? She couldn’t stop herself from rubbing Todd’s nose in that love bite on Becca Jowett’s neck and she was the one who insisted on looking over the house at the last minute before the closing. I bet if he hadn’t said something about that couch, she’d’ve found a reason to move that afghan and find the blood herself.”

His speculations suddenly drew up short. “But she said she was with her kids and their grandparents during the relevant times.”

“Did anyone actually confirm that?” Sigrid asked.

“I don’t think so,” he said slowly. “But you know something? I got the impression that she’s the one who went back out to Creekside next morning to dispose of the trapped rats and set new traps. If she did, that would certainly put her in the vicinity of the dump site early Sunday morning.”

He smiled at me. “It’s your theory about the husband, applied to the wife. Kill Becca Jowett, hide her body in the back of the truck, dispose of it at her convenience.”

“But why would she kill the woman in the first place?” Sigrid objected. “Didn’t you say the affair was brief and already over? Isn’t divorce easier?”

“You’ve evidently never been through one,” I said dryly. “Especially a contentious divorce that involves children and a business partnership. Not to mention the humiliation of having your friends know. If they were supposed to close on the house this week, then they would be past the point of being able to walk away without losing money. How would you feel about buying a house from someone your husband had sex with, knowing that she was going to collect a healthy commission on it, and wondering if he was so enthusiastic about the house because of her?”

“Why don’t I ask her?” Dwight said, punching Mayleen Richards’s number on his contact list.

When she answered, he instructed her to invite the Todds to come in and talk to them.

Now.

“Want to sit in on it?” he asked Sigrid.

“Sure,” she said.

I shook my head when the waitress offered us the dessert menu. A check of my watch showed I was due back in court in ten minutes. Regretfully, I said, “Y’all have fun,” and headed back to the courthouse.