The Buzzard Table

CHAPTER

14


Male and female turkey vultures are identical in appearance.

—The Turkey Vulture Society




Major Dwight Bryant—Thursday morning

Thank you for coming in,” Dwight said, extending a hand to Wes Todd and his wife, Ginger. “This shouldn’t take too long. We do understand that time is money.”

“Not as much as it used to be,” Mrs. Todd said with a self-conscious laugh. “So many people are behind in their mortgage payments, they don’t worry about termites or carpenter ants.” She wore a billed cap with a cutout and an adjustable plastic band in the back. Her flaming red hair, the color of maple leaves in October, was pulled away from her heart-shaped face in a long ponytail that protruded from the cutout and bounced against her shoulders whenever she moved her head. “We’ve laid off some workers and I’ve had to get back out in the field myself because there’s not enough office work to keep me busy all day.”

“It’s just temporary till the economy picks up,” Wes Todd said, as if nettled by her comment on the state of their business.

When they shook hands, Dwight noticed that Mrs. Todd’s were almost as callused as her husband’s. Despite her slim build and hesitant smile, this was a woman who probably helped haul extension ladders in and out of their trucks and who could drill through concrete foundations to get at termite nests.

She took one of the chairs at the table in the interview room and undid the zipper of her jacket. Like her husband’s, it was sturdy brown canvas with the words “Todd Pest Control” and a local phone number stitched in orange on the back. They both wore brown canvas coveralls and work boots, too, but while those work clothes made her husband look competent and strong and ready to face anything from coons and bats to mice and hornets, she looked more like a tagalong tomboy who would cringe from a garter snake.

“Now, honey,” her husband said, taking charge, “they don’t want to hear about our business. They want to hear what we know about Becca Jowett, right, Bryant?” His dismissive man-to-man tone made Dwight glad he’d sent Mayleen Richards out to interview the dead woman’s mother and sister this morning. Todd’s attitude would have had her hackles rising.

Mrs. Todd didn’t seem to mind his patronizing words. She was more worried about the video camera that was pointing in her direction. She fluffed her ponytail, then clasped her hands in front of her on the table, both feet firmly on the floor.

Dwight explained that Deputy McLamb would video the interview and assured them that they could stop it at any time if they felt they were about to say something incriminating.

Ginger Todd’s eyes widened. “Incriminating? Wes?” She looked at her husband anxiously.

He teetered between annoyance and embarrassment. “God, Ginger, as many of those stupid CSI shows as you watch, you’ve got to know that they question everybody when someone gets murdered. They don’t think we had anything to do with it. It’s just routine, right?”

“Right,” Dwight said with a reassuring smile for Mrs. Todd. “We’re trying to get a feel for what Mrs. Jowett was like, whether you noticed anything that might help us learn who did this to her. For instance, when did you-all meet?”

Ginger Todd relaxed enough to tell how they had sat at the same table with Paula Coyne and Rebecca at a Chamber of Commerce lunch last fall. “I said something about needing a bigger house now that our daughter’s getting too old to share a room with her brother anymore.”

“That’s all Ginger had to say,” Todd said with a rueful smile. “Becca jumped right on it. She was one sharp lady. Told us that the housing market had probably bottomed out and that if we were ever going to get a bigger house in a better neighborhood with a good school for the kids, we needed to act quick before prices started back up.”

“The updated colonial on East Cleveland Street was one of the first she showed us,” his wife said, “even though it was way out of our price range.”

“Not that far out,” Todd snapped. “We’re not on food stamps yet.”

His words made Dwight realize that this was a man who measured his worth by his bank account and what he could buy, whether or not he could actually afford it.

“It was higher than we wanted to go,” his wife said stubbornly, “but it was a short sale and Becca was sure the bank would come down on it. Which they did. While we were waiting, she showed us some other places, but this one was so perfect for us.”

“We lowballed the offer and the bank accepted it,” Wes Todd said, now smugly proud of his business acumen. “We were supposed to close this very afternoon.”

“Now we have to start looking all over again,” Ginger Todd said.

Her husband gave Dwight another of those man-to-man looks. “Our lawyer says we can probably get our earnest money back because of what happened there, but Ms. Coyne says the bank’s willing to cut the price another five thousand if we’ll go ahead with the deal.”

Mrs. Todd’s face flushed as bright as her hair. “I told you, Wes. I don’t care if they give us the damn house on a silver platter. I’m not living there, so forget it!”

In answer to Dwight’s questions, they agreed that Becca Jowett had been friendly and helpful, “but in the end, we were a potential commission, not best friends,” Ginger Todd said. “It’s not like she would tell us if she was upset about anything. Although…”

“Yes?”

“We told you how she showed us the house again Saturday morning so I could measure the windows?”

Dwight nodded encouragingly.

“She had such pretty long brown hair, not like my carrot top. When we were leaving, she started to zip up her coat and her hair got caught. I helped her untangle it and I saw that she had a hickey on the side of her neck. I said something about her husband being a real tiger and she looked embarrassed and, I don’t know, I got the feeling maybe it wasn’t her husband that gave it to her.”

“Oh for God’s sake, Ginger!” her husband said, looking uncomfortable.

“I’m not talking ugly about the dead, Wes. They ought to know.” She turned back to Dwight and McLamb. “Such a pretty woman. It’s a real shame.”

When asked to say where they were Saturday night, Mrs. Todd said, “Wes got a call around six-thirty and had to go out on a job, so I took the children over to spend the night at my parents’ and stayed to visit awhile. Wes got back—what time, honey? Around nine? Nine-fifteen?”

“Something like that. These days, we never say no to any job, no matter what the time,” Todd said and gave them the name and address of a customer whose teenage daughter was freaking out because she was sure there were rats in the wall of her bedroom.

“She was right,” he said. “There were. I baited six traps—two in the attic, two in the crawl space under the house, and two in her bedroom that I baited with her leftover cheese pizza. We caught a pregnant female with the pizza. A fat male in the crawl space went for the peanut butter.”



The Kendricks were a good ten years older than the Todds, well-to-do and still on the sunny side of fifty. Their children were out of the house and the Kendricks declared themselves ready to embrace a more carefree lifestyle.

“I’ve had it with old houses and big yards,” Paul Kendrick said. “I want to sell my riding lawnmower so I can play golf on the weekends. Let a homeowner’s association do the mowing and pruning.”

“And I want granite countertops and stainless steel appliances,” his wife, Nita, said. “Three bedrooms, not five. Low-maintenance and no strings. We’ve even told our daughter she’ll have to take her dog when she graduates this spring so we can pick up and go whenever we want to.”

She was a small cuddly woman with a stylish, asymmetrical gray bob, a surprisingly deep laugh, and a penchant for bright red lipstick and bold colors. She wore large hoop earrings, three-inch heels, and formfitting black slacks with a cropped red wool jacket.

Paul Kendrick looked like an ad for a man’s hair-coloring product. Just under six feet tall, he had thick gray hair, a cleft chin, well-toned chest muscles beneath his sage green sweater, and the poised assurance of someone who has always known himself attractive to women.

“Too damn bad about poor Becca,” he said when he and his wife entered the interview room shortly after the Todds left.

“Boyfriend or husband?” Mrs. Kendrick asked brightly.

“Excuse me?” Dwight said.

“Oh, don’t mind her,” Paul Kendrick said with a self-deprecating chuckle. “She thought Becca was hot for me. I can’t convince her that it was all part of the woman’s sales pitch—flirt with the men, flatter the women, and maybe we won’t notice the chipped tiles or where the dog pissed on the carpet.”

A brief look of uneasiness crossed his handsome face when he realized that the interview was to be recorded, but his wife smiled into the camera and said, “Well, of course we don’t mind, but there’s really not much to tell. We met Becca at a fund-raiser for Doug Woodall when he ran for governor last year, and we called her about two weeks ago when we decided to put our house on the market. She explained how she could only work as our buying agent, so we listed our house with Cubby Lee Honeycutt and she started showing us every condo and town house in Dobbs and Widdington, too. Unfortunately none of them rang our chimes. We were going to tell her that we’d about decided to look in Raleigh or Cary instead. Real estate’s a little pricier there and so are the taxes, but that’s where the good restaurants are and the symphony and ballet, too, for that matter. Once we sell the house and Paul retires in another five or six years, there’s nothing to hold us here in Colleton County.”

“When did you last speak to Mrs. Jowett?” Dwight asked.

“Last Saturday,” Nita Kendrick said promptly. “She called to say there was one more town house she wanted to show us that had just come on the market, a three-bedroom end unit, just like we’d told her we wanted, but we’d already looked at another one in that neighborhood and it was a little more downscale than we wanted.”

“So you didn’t go take a look?”

“No.”

“Actually,” Paul Kendrick said sheepishly, “I did.”

“What?” His wife’s pretty face registered surprise.

“Saturday afternoon. You’d gone to that baby shower for the Witchger boy’s wife, so when she called again and swore that unit was perfect for us, it just seemed easier to let her show it to me than turn her down altogether. I wasn’t doing anything else that afternoon and she’d put in a lot of time for us.”

“That was her job,” Mrs. Kendrick said. Ice frosted every word.

“I know, I know, hon. But it was something to do. As soon as I walked in the place, I knew it wasn’t for us and I told her so. In fact, I went ahead and told her that we were going to start looking in Raleigh.”

Nita Kendrick continued to stare at him coldly and he became even more conciliatory. “She got a little bitchy about it, so I wrapped it up and left. I wasn’t there a half hour, and you know I was home before you were.”

To fill the awkward silence that followed, Dwight asked if Rebecca Jowett had seemed upset or preoccupied with something other than real estate.

“She seemed the same as usual to me,” Mr. Kendrick said.

“Did she ever mention problems in her personal life?”

“Not really,” said Mrs. Kendrick while her husband gave a negative shrug. “She did ask how I kept in shape and said she had to run several evenings a week or she’d look like Miss Piggy.” She clenched her fists and flexed her forearms as if pumping hand weights. “Paul and I work out in our home gym every morning.”

For such a small woman, Dwight suspected she could throw a mean punch were she so inclined.

“Just for the record, could you tell us where you were Saturday night between seven and midnight?”

Paul Kendrick started to object, but his wife stopped him with a look.

“They have to ask, darling,” she said sweetly. “After all, you might have been the last one to talk to her before she disappeared, unless Major Bryant knows of someone else?”

When Dwight didn’t rise to her bait, she smiled at him. “Very well. I came home from the shower a little before six with a splitting headache, so I took some aspirin and went straight up to bed. Sleep is the only thing that helps. I woke up a little before ten, and when I came down, Paul and Mitzi were gone.”

“Mitzi?”

“Our daughter’s spaniel,” Kendrick said. “I watched a DVD, then took her out for a walk. If you don’t believe me, one of our neighbors was out with their dog, too.”

“Oh, I’m sure he believes you, darling,” said Mrs. Kendrick. “Although you do see that if I was sound asleep, how do we know that you—?”

“Not funny, Nita. She’s joking, Major Bryant.”

Dwight frowned at her. “Murder’s not a laughing matter, Mrs. Kendrick.”

“You’re right,” she said contritely. “I shouldn’t tease. Paul and I were both in all evening. I couldn’t get to sleep right away and I heard him banging around in the kitchen for at least a half hour. I even woke up for a few minutes sometime between then and ten and heard the music from one of our favorite movies, so he was home, too.”

As they watched the Kendricks leave, Ray McLamb murmured to Dwight, “That’s one p-ssy-whipped dude. Wonder how many nights he’s gonna be sleeping on the couch?”



“Sorry, Dwight,” Reid Stephenson said when told why he’d been invited to stop by the sheriff’s department. “I was in Southern Pines Saturday night. A command performance with the parents.”

Deborah’s cousin and former law partner was the firm’s current Stephenson, but his father, Brix Junior, remained a powerful entity even though he was retired and had technically handed his share of the partnership over to Reid. His mother sat on the boards of a half dozen charities.

“They’ve found another debutante for me,” Reid said with a grimace. “This one breeds hunters. Tally-ho, y’all.”

Dwight grinned. “All the same, ol’ son, Rebecca Jowett’s calendar for Saturday night says ‘Reid S’ with an exclamation mark beside it.”

“Yeah, well, she did call and ask me if I’d like to have a drink with her. Her husband was going to be out of town and she wanted to celebrate her first sale in over two weeks. Sounded fine to me. We hadn’t gotten together in a few months and she was always good for a few laughs. Then Mother called and played the guilt card, so I asked for a rain check.” He shook his head. “I’ve felt really bad about it ever since I heard she disappeared Saturday evening. If I hadn’t canceled, you reckon she’d still be alive?”



“I couldn’t believe it at first,” said Larry Sokoloff, a pudgy thirtysomething. “You don’t expect somebody you know to get murdered, do you?”

Newly divorced and looking for a small house with enough land to let his two goldens romp freely, he had met Rebecca Jowett for the first time last week when he walked into Coyne Realty and asked about a listing in the local newspaper. “My ex-wife got the house back in Wisconsin, I got the dogs and no alimony payments. Becca was supposed to show me a place on Sunday, but she never called. I thought she’d blown me off.”

He was a cardiac nurse out at the hospital and had spent Saturday night working the four-to-midnight shift in the intensive care unit. When asked about his relationship with Becca Jowett, he’d frowned. “What relationship? It was all business.”

Well, yes, he admitted, she might have flirted with him a bit, “but I’m not ready to get back in the game yet. Besides, I thought she was just being Southern.”



Cubby Lee Honeycutt had an exclusive for the house on East Cleveland Street, “but the damn thing may never sell after this,” he said gloomily as he jotted down the name of the last real estate agent to show it before the Todds put in an offer.

When questioned, that agent said, “Yes, I showed it to a couple who were moving down from New Jersey, but they wanted to add on a wing for a mother-in-law suite and the neighborhood covenants won’t allow that.

“Rebecca Jowett? Sure, I knew her. Knew who she was anyhow. We weren’t really friends. Just business associates. Makes you think about showing a house to strangers, doesn’t it? I’ve never had a bad experience, but a friend of mine down in Atlanta was almost raped.” She held up the cell phone in her hand and clicked the deputy’s picture. “Before I go inside a house alone, I always send a picture of the client back to my office, and I make sure they know it.”



A canvass of the houses that backed up to the berm separating Grayson Village from the Ferrabee tract and the old dump where the body was found had turned up nothing. No headlights shining through the thick pine trees, no sightings of people.

“A few teenagers used to ride their four-wheelers over there when the weather was nice,” one homeowner told them, “but as cold and wet as it’s been, I haven’t seen or heard any of them since that warm weekend back in January.”

They had located some of the teenagers in question. The kids knew about the dump and had picked through it. “I got the glass door off a real old washer,” one of them said. “Made me a neat picture frame.” But except for a cranky Englishman who’d chased them away and threatened them with trespassing, they had never seen anyone else on the deserted land.

When she returned from interviewing the dead woman’s family, Mayleen Richards reported that the parents were too grief-stricken to be of much help. “They’re sure the whole world loved her, that her marriage was perfect, and that no one could possibly have a reason to hurt her.”

“So what else is new?” Dwight said, remembering Dave Jowett’s stunned disbelief when he delivered the bad news yesterday.

“Her sister was there.”

“And?”

“She seems to be real conflicted over the whole situation. She loved her sister, but she’s heard the rumors and she was angry for the way Becca cheated on her husband. From some of the things she said, I get the feeling that she might have feelings for him.”

“She have an alibi?”

“She and a friend share an apartment and both of them were in and out the whole weekend.”

“Hey, boss,” said McLamb, who had been studying the large map of the county that hung on the wall of the squad room. “That address the Todd guy gave you. The place with the rats?”

“Yeah?”

“It’s in the Creekside development on the other side of that new grocery store out near you. Less than a mile from where the body was dumped.”

“Rats?” asked Richards.

Dwight briefed her on the people he had interviewed that morning. “Oh, and we got the preliminary results of the autopsy. They can’t say for sure when she died, but it was around an hour after eating at least one stalk of celery with what they think was pimento cheese. I don’t suppose you looked in her refrigerator?”

“No, but want me to call her husband and see?”

Dwight nodded. “And then you and Ray go out and see if you can find out when Mr. Todd got there to set his rat traps and exactly how long it took him.”

“You got it, boss,” Raeford McLamb said. He glanced at the clock. Almost lunchtime. “Whatcha feel like having for lunch, Mayleen? A slaw dog or hamburger?”

“Tacos,” she told him with a happy smile.