The Buzzard Table (7 page)

“Well, Jeremy says he wants to be a photojournalist, so I thought that I could talk to him about that, maybe rope Martin in to show him how you can earn a living taking noncontroversial pictures.”

“He’s what? Seventeen? Eighteen? And his brother was killed in Afghanistan?”

Anne nodded.

“You think he’s going to be distracted by birds as long as there are wars and people shooting at each other?”

“Probably not,” Anne agreed. “That’s why Richard suggested that we take him to a disabled vets’ center and have him document the stories of local veterans. He thinks it might help with Jeremy’s grief over losing his brother. But Martin could still give him some tips. Did you look at the book he gave Mother? Unless he manipulated the images, he must have been on a mountaintop with a really powerful telephoto lens to get some of those shots, looking down on those birds in flight.”

She glanced at her watch. “Want to ride out there with me?”

“Out where?”

“To the old farmhouse where Martin’s staying. I haven’t been there in years, but I think I can still find it. It’s not far from Gilead and you’ve never seen that place either, have you?”

“As long as we’re back before the bank closes,” Sigrid said.

Major Dwight Bryant—
Wednesday afternoon (continued)

Y
es, we have found blood,” Dwight admitted to an angry Dave Jowett, “but until we have a sample of your wife’s DNA to test it against, we can’t know for sure that it’s her blood.”

“Who else’s would it be?” the man asked as his anger gave way to apprehension and the beginning of grief. “My God, she
is
dead, isn’t she?”

“It was a lot of blood,” the big deputy said quietly. “Be a real coincidence if it isn’t hers what with her missing and all, but coincidences do happen.”

He nodded to Mayleen Richards, who leafed through the file folder on the table and pulled out a form.

Dwight handed it to Jowett. “This gives us permission to search your house.”

“Search my house? Why? The blood was in that other house, not ours.”

“But there might be clues that will help us identify who she was meeting.”

When Jowett hesitated, Dwight leaned toward him and said, “Right now, we don’t have enough to get a formal search warrant, but if you make us wait until we do, you’re giving whoever’s responsible more time to cover their tracks.”

Dave Jowett reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and pulled out a pen. “Where do I sign?”

“Is there a computer at your house?”

“Yes, but Becca never uses it. She gets all her mail on her iPhone and uses her iPad for everything else.” He finished filling in the blanks, then signed and dated the form.

“One more thing, sir,” Richards said.

She was turning a faint pink and Dwight realized that she was about to say something embarrassing despite her experience here on the force.

Seeing the gleam of amusement in her boss’s eyes, Mayleen lifted her chin with determination. “When did you and your wife last have sex?”

Outraged, Jowett glared at her.

“It’s for purposes of elimination,” she said, stubbornly holding her ground and looking him squarely in the face.

“Along with the blood, we found semen stains on the couch,” Dwight told him.

Now it was Dave Jowett who looked embarrassed. “Not since New Year’s Eve.” Completely deflated now, he dropped his eyes and added, “I guess she’d drunk enough champagne to give me pity sex.”

While Dwight turned to other matters that required his attention, Richards gathered up a team that included Percy Denning and Detective Raeford McLamb, and they headed over to the Jowett home, where Dave Jowett let them in. He gave them his cell phone number and said, “I’m going over to her mother’s. Lock up when you’re finished.”

They put on latex gloves and spread out through the house, where they quickly identified Rebecca Jowett’s bedroom. From the toiletries they found, Mayleen realized that not only did Dave Jowett sleep in the guest bedroom, but he had also been relegated to the guest bathroom.

Mentally crossing her fingers, she immediately went to the laundry hamper in the master bath.

“Bingo!” she crowed to Denning, who was right beside her.

The hamper was three-fourths full, indicating that the missing woman was not someone whose clothes went into the washer downstairs the same day that she took them off. Underpants and bras were tangled in with shirts and ankle socks.

While an assistant recorded everything with a digital video camera, Denning carefully laid the clothes out on the bathroom floor as if documenting layers from an archaeological dig. Near the top of the hamper was a lace-trimmed bikini brief with stains that made Denning smile when he hooked them out with a gloved finger. “Looks like postcoital vaginal leakage to me,” he said and carefully transferred it to a separate evidence bag. The other undergarments were also bagged and labeled. At the very bottom were a similarly stained pair of underpants.

They checked the medicine cabinet and the bedside drawers, but except for birth control pills, the only drugs they found were over-the-counter items.

Her iPad was on the dining table next to her purse, and a quick check of her electronic calendar showed all of her appointments for the year. For Saturday, there were two midday appointments.

In addition to the Todds, Becca Jowett appeared to be actively involved with two other clients, and she had evidently planned to meet with one of them Sunday afternoon to show a house out in the country.

Farther down, in the 5:30 slot, was the notation “Reid S.” and an exclamation mark.

McLamb was examining the missing woman’s purse and wallet and Mayleen showed him the calendar. “What do you think, Ray? Reid Stephenson?”

“The attorney? Could be.” He grinned. “They say he lights up a lot of women’s lives.”

Richards copied off the names before sliding the device into another evidence bag.

“Too bad she took her phone with her,” he said and patted his own phone that was clipped to his belt. “We’re all walking around with almost everything worth knowing about us right here.”

As Dave Jowett had told them, the computer in their downstairs office appeared to be used solely by him. Apparently he was a trusting soul because nothing was password-protected, not even his email.

The few messages to or from his wife were the usual innocuous reminders about household matters, appointments, and social engagements. Considering the state of the Jowett marriage, they were surprised to see references to so many of those. Most seemed to be family-related. Both Jowetts were from the county and both sets of parents still lived nearby. There were events for various relatives—“Don’t forget your mom’s birthday on Wednesday,” read one recent message signed “B.”

Another was, “Jen wants to know if we can come over for bridge tomorrow night.”

There were also dinners with Dave Jowett’s business associates—“Please don’t forget that Dale’s wife is a Tea Party conservative, so no smug liberal comments, okay?” or “I’ve told the Krongards you had a four-bedroom house on your books and they sounded interested. You might want to have a few pictures on your iPhone when we meet them for drinks tonight.”

All were signed “xoxo, Dave.”

“Poor guy,” Richards said. “I guess old habits die hard.”

Her own phone rang, and Major Bryant’s name appeared on the screen.

“Is Denning still there?” her boss asked.

“Yessir.”

“Good. Sounds like we’ve found Rebecca Jowett’s body.”

Major Dwight Bryant—
Wednesday afternoon (continued)

D
wight had almost forgotten about this dead-end dirt-and-gravel road near where he had grown up and still lived. If asked, he would have said it had probably disappeared under the wheels of bulldozers and cement trucks when G. Hooks Talton bought up most of the land on the south side of Possum Creek and built Grayson Village to spite Kezzie Knott, Deborah’s father.

The incident still brought grins to the faces of those in the know. That a wily old ex-bootlegger with a sixth-grade education had outfoxed a multimillionaire with a full stable of attorneys who hadn’t bothered to read the fine print on the deeds to the farms they thought they were secretly buying up was still good for a laugh over sausage and biscuit breakfasts in any of the gas-and-grub eateries that still survived around Cotton Grove.

He must have zipped past this narrow unpaved road dozens of times since the big NutriGood grocery store opened, but he’d had no cause to turn onto it in years. Back when he was a teenager, this had been a makeout spot for randy teenagers. In fact, now that he was remembering, it was here in the backseat of his first car, an old Mercury, that he and Patty Sue Milledge had both lost their virginity. Patty Sue was a surgical nurse at WakeMed now, married and the mother of teenagers; and although they never mentioned that night again, they always hugged each other whenever their paths crossed at weddings and funerals and class reunions.

He briefly wondered if Deborah had ever parked here after a movie or a ball game; if there were a male equivalent to Patty Sue still in the area.

A single patrol car parked beside the turnoff brought his mind back to the present. He lowered his window to speak to the young officer who held a roll of yellow tape and gestured to the rough track that led through a thick stand of trees.

“Everybody’s down there, Major,” he said. “The crime scene van got here about fifteen minutes ago.”

“Thanks, son. Just make sure we don’t get any sightseers till we’re finished.”

“Yessir!”

Twigs scraped the sides of his truck as he followed the nearly nonexistent lane. As he oriented himself, he soon realized that he was paralleling a berm that separated this end of Grayson Village and its manicured lawns from wiregrass, sandspurs, and the volunteer pines that had sprung up in what used to be a cotton field. The lane sloped down and he knew that he must be approaching Possum Creek, but the young pines were so thick that he was only a few yards away before he finally spotted the county’s crime scene van and a couple of squad cars.

Mayleen Richards came over to meet him as he got out of the truck and zipped up his heavy jacket.

“She’s down there.” The tip of her nose was pink and her breath came in little puffs of steam when she spoke. “We’re just waiting for the ME.”

The bank dropped off sharply into a gully that ran along the creek, and a section of the track was cordoned off.

“That where she went over?” he asked.

“Denning thinks so,” she said. “The leaves and grass look like they were trampled there.”

In past years, before the county began maintaining waste disposal sites, this had evidently been a popular dumping place. A roll of rotten carpeting lay next to a rusty refrigerator and a broken toilet. Other household appliances were strewn along the creek bank. Black plastic garbage bags had long ago been torn open by foraging animals, the disposable diapers, aluminum pie plates, and pizza boxes spilled out and left to decay amid glass bottles and tin cans that were nearly obscured by years of grapevines and dead leaves. The slender body of a woman dressed in a dark blue warm-up suit and running shoes lay at the near edge of the gully, half covered by a filthy mildewed mattress.

“I don’t know how she got found,” Richards said. She thumbed her cell phone to show him pictures of the scene before they disturbed it. “She was totally hidden by that mattress. Who called it in, sir?”

“Faye said it was from an unlisted number. She thought the voice was male and not from around here, but she couldn’t keep him on the line long enough to talk him into IDing himself.”

Richards smiled. If Faye Myers, their gossipy gregarious dispatcher, couldn’t dislodge the name, no one could.

Down below, Denning and his assistant were documenting the scene as best they could without further disturbing the body. As they waited a blue jay flew by and crows called to each other from some trees on the other side of the creek. Despite the recent rain, it had been a fairly dry winter and the creek looked a little lower than in winters past.

A few minutes later, the EMS truck arrived on the heels of the ME, who clambered down into the gully and quickly went through the formality of confirming what they pretty much knew already.

“Pulpy head wound, no signs of rigor, advancing decomposition,” he said. “Last seen around seven o’clock Saturday? Yeah, that could be about right. Underneath that mattress and next to the dirt? Temperatures above freezing every night since then? Yeah, I’d say dead about three days. They’ll open her up over in Chapel Hill, but I doubt they’ll get it any closer than that.”

He climbed back up and stood shaking his head as the deputies below lifted the mattress away from the body. “It’s the Jowett woman, isn’t it? Never met her myself, but my sister lives next door to her parents. They’ve been sick with worry. Gonna be a sad time for them.”

Grabbing hold of a three-foot oak sapling for support, Dwight worked his way down to the dump site and looked into Rebecca Jowett’s chilled white face. Her hair was matted with blood and he could tell that blowflies had found the wound, but everything else looked normal. Odd the way death always relaxed the muscles and wiped away every emotion. No matter how the person died, whether peacefully in bed or in a violent shooting, he had never seen any frowns or grimaces of fear or pain on the faces of the dead, only a smooth disinterested neutrality.

“Finding anything?” he asked Denning.

The deputy shook his head in frustration. “Absolutely nothing, Major.”

He pointed to the edge of the drop-off secured with yellow crime scene tape. “We think she was probably rolled off there and then the mattress pulled over her. Except for the body itself, everything else looks like it’s been here for months.”

“No shoe tracks around the body?”

“Just the tip of one. I took pictures but there’s not enough to go on. No tread mark and some big bird must have landed on top of it. Crow or buzzard probably.”

Both men looked up. Sure enough, three or four of the big birds were drifting on the thermals in wide lazy circles overhead.

“I don’t suppose anyone thought to look for tire tracks before y’all drove over them?”

“Wrong, Major. Mayleen and Ray and I, we stopped to check a couple of times on the way back in. Pine straw’s pretty thick and any tire marks would have been washed away in last night’s rain. You can see our own tracks, though.”

“So whoever found the body and reported it must have walked over.” He turned to Ray McLamb and said, “Do a canvass of the houses there along the back. Maybe it was someone out walking his dog or kids playing. And ask about any activity over this way during the weekend—lights at night, the sound of a vehicle. You know the drill.”

He climbed back up and told the EMS crew that they could transport the body, then noticed that the trail continued along the creek bank. He got in his truck and followed it a few hundred feet. It circled around another thick stand of slash pines before opening up into a half-abandoned pasture. There was that concrete slab Deborah had told him about and there, too, in the distance was the tenant house.

He drove back to the dump, gestured for Mayleen to join him, and called the dispatcher. “Hey, Faye. How ’bout you play me back the call you got on this body.”

After listening closely, he said, “Now play it again for Mayleen,” and handed her his phone.

When she had thanked the dispatcher and ended the call, Dwight said, “Did that sound like a British accent to you?”