The Buzzard Table

CHAPTER

16


Its primary form of defense is regurgitating semi-digested meat, a foul-smelling substance that deters most creatures.

—The Turkey Vulture Society




Major Dwight Bryant—Thursday afternoon

When Dwight and Ray McLamb, followed by Percy Denning in his van, pulled into the parking lot of Todd Pest Control, the door to the office was locked, but a flat cardboard clock face with moveable hands indicated that someone would be back at two. As it was now 2:00 on the dot, they leaned against the side of the van to enjoy the warmth of the February sun and to talk about Carolina’s chances at the ACC basketball tournament next month. Despite the cool air and the diesel fumes as a semi ground its gears and eased away from the traffic light on the corner, it felt good to be outside.

At 2:04, a beige pickup with bright orange lettering pulled in beside them and Wesley Todd got out of the cab, accompanied by one of his workers. Both wore the company’s brown coveralls and jacket. Todd handed the man some keys and gestured for him to go on inside before walking over to them.

“Help you, Major?” he asked warily, squinting in the bright sunlight.

“I hope so,” Dwight told him. “We’d like to search your truck if you don’t mind.”

“Search my truck? Why?” He bristled as Denning and McLamb moved around to the rear and began to lower the tailgate. “What the hell y’all think you’re doing? You’re damn right I mind.”

“Actually, we have a search warrant, Mr. Todd,” Dwight said, pulling it from his jacket pocket. “Rebecca Jowett’s body was transported from the house on East Cleveland to that dump site over near the Creekside subdivision where you were on Saturday night. We’re wondering if your truck was used.”

“You think I killed Becca?”

“You tell me, sir. You were having sex with her, weren’t you?”

“Go to hell!”

Todd’s big hands clenched into fists, but before he could land the punch, Dwight caught his arm and twisted it back. McLamb hurried over and together they pinned the man into submission.

“Whoa, now,” Dwight said, loosening his hold on Todd. “How ’bout you back that mule up and let’s start over again.”

They released him and Todd stood there rubbing his elbow where it had been wrenched. Still angry, he straightened the billed cap that had been pushed sideways in the scuffle and said, “I don’t know where you got the idea I—”

“We found semen stains on that long couch you liked so much,” Dwight told him bluntly. “And more stains on Mrs. Jowett’s underwear. We’ve sent them to the SBI for DNA analysis, along with the cup you drank from in my office this morning. You willing to bet we won’t get a match?”

Todd held his belligerence a moment longer, then backed down. “Okay. Yeah. We had a thing going there for a while, but that doesn’t mean I killed her. We both knew it was just a fling.”

His anger changed to a half-sheepish, half-smug look of masculine cockiness. “That husband of hers was a weenie and she was ready for a real man. She came on to me first and she liked what I had to offer.”

“Except you got a little too rough?” Dwight asked.

“That little nip on her neck? Hell, man, that was just a goodbye present. I’ve got a good marriage and I’m not about to mess it up for some little fancy-pants who thought she could play with fire and not get her fingers burned. And listen, you’re not going to say anything about this to my wife, are you? I’ll be honest with you, okay? Yeah, I boned her, but it was over.”

“You’re saying you dumped her? That’s not what she said.”

“Huh? She talked about me?”

“Not by name,” Dwight admitted. “But once we realized it was probably you? DNA doesn’t lie, you know.”

McLamb had gone back to searching the truck with Denning, who had finished with the cab. Now he looked over to Dwight and said, “No tarp.”

“Tarp?” asked Todd. “Why would I carry a tarp?”

Both men walked around to the back of the long-bed utility truck. Side racks held an extension ladder and a stepladder. The back of the truck itself held buckets of chemicals with hazardous warnings, a sprayer, traps of various sizes, and other pieces of equipment.

“Ah,” said Denning. “Missed it before.”

Crammed up under the utility toolbox behind some coils of plastic tubing was a roll of heavy clear plastic sheeting.

“When did you last use any of it?” Dwight asked.

“Three weeks ago,” Todd answered. “The Dik-a-Doo Motel out on the bypass. One of the outside rooms got bedbugs and we had to seal off the door and window and fumigate the place.”

“We’re going to have to take that,” Dwight said.

Wes Todd glanced at his watch and then at the glass door of the office, where his employee could be seen looking out in curiosity. “My wife’s due back here any minute, so could y’all just take what you want and leave? You know how women are. She sees you here, she’s gonna want to know why, and now I’ve got to go make sure Salvador there don’t mention y’all either. I’m asking you, man-to-man. Don’t tell her about me and Becca, okay?”

“We won’t. Unless it turns out you’ve been lying about what you did Saturday night. Just don’t leave the area.”



“Surprise, darling!” Paul Kendrick said, handing his wife a shiny brochure and an envelope with two airline tickets to Puerto Vallarta.

Nita opened it with the tips of her perfectly manicured fingernails and frowned. “What’s this?”

“A Valentine present. I’ve rented us a little hacienda in Sayulita for the rest of the month.”

“Sayulita?”

“Don’t you remember? The Grebers stayed there last year and loved it and you said it sounded heavenly. A pool comes with the house. And a maid. We can be sunning ourselves and drinking margaritas day after tomorrow.”

“Saturday?” Even though three weeks in Mexico implied more than the usual peace offering, she decided to be generous. After all, the little slut was dead. “I’ll have to run in to Raleigh this afternoon. I don’t have a thing to wear. You’ll need to see about boarding the dog and get someone to keep an eye on the house.”

“I don’t have a thing to wear” usually meant a twelve-hundred-dollar shopping spree; but even with the tickets and the rental cost, if it kept Nita from asking more questions or consulting an attorney, he knew he was getting out cheaply.

By the time they got back, the police would have pinned someone else for Rebecca Jowett’s murder or else the investigation would have moved to the back burner. Either way, they surely wouldn’t care where he was Saturday night.



“From there, I moved on to Chiclayo, then up into the mountains above Chota, where I found these nestlings—Sarcoramphus papa—and their parents.” Martin Crawford clicked his mouse and a soaring vista of rocky crags, blue skies, and a pair of adult king vultures filled the screen of his laptop. They had bright orange patches on their heads and their black-tipped white wings spanned five feet.

It was a gorgeous picture.

Just like the other fifty or sixty gorgeous pictures he had showed them, thought Jeremy Harper, who was starting to be bored out of his skull. With Anne’s cousin in the middle, he had been forced to sit shoulder to shoulder like this for almost forty-five minutes. Anne Harald had met him in the high school parking lot and led the way out here. She had promised him an interesting afternoon, and the first few slides of Peruvian fiestas with the colorfully dressed natives had been okay, but how many stupid bird pictures was he supposed to look at before he could say, “Okay, I get it,” and they could move on to something better? It didn’t help that a rank odor emanated from the man’s clothes.

“I’m quite certain I saw those pictures I took in La Libertad just a day or two ago, Anne,” he said with pedantic fussiness. “Let me see now. You were there to photograph El Diego at his house in Trujillo, correct?”

“Who’s El Diego?” Jeremy asked, grateful for a change of subject.

“The greatest living Peruvian poet at the time,” Anne said. She leaned forward to talk across Martin while he scrolled through one page of thumbnail vulture pictures after another so rapidly that they almost blurred. “Word was out that he was finally going to be given the Nobel Prize in Literature because his main opponent on the Nobel Committee had suddenly dropped dead. He was quite old and he had twisted his ankle while my editor was arranging the interview. Charlie—my editor—was sure that he was going to break out in waves of senility before I got there. It was a good interview, though. The man was brilliant, and he had such an expressive face that the pictures almost took themselves. A month later, the magazine ran them both as a three-page obituary.”

“Huh?”

She shrugged and used her fingers to comb back the short salt-and-pepper curls that fell over her forehead. “The twisted ankle turned out to be a broken hip as well. By the time they realized and put him in the hospital…” She shrugged. “He got pneumonia and slipped into a coma. I was the last one to interview him.”

“Wow!” said the teenager.

“Wow, indeed, young Jeremy,” Martin Crawford said ponderously. “One never knows when history is going to be made. That’s why you must stay alert, keep your cameras ready, and act as if this is the last bird you’ll ever photograph before it goes extinct. The same with your disabled veterans. Any one of them could pop off without a moment’s notice, is that not right, Anne?”

She murmured agreement, but before she could expand on her answer, Crawford said, “Now these eight pictures of a fledgling Vultur gryphus were taken just as it stepped up to the edge of the cliff to try its wings for the first time. Had I not been watching carefully, I would have assumed it was waiting to see a parent return with food.”

Jeremy sighed and dutifully turned his eyes back to the screen. His eye was caught by one of the thumbnails at the top of the screen. Each tiny picture represented a separate file and this one looked like a Gulfstream jet.

“What’s that?” he asked, pointing to the file.

“Which?” Martin moved his cursor to the top. A click of the mouse and the whole line of thumbnails was replaced by another line. He clicked a few more times, but that picture never reappeared. “Oh, dear. I’m always losing my place.”

“It was a small jet,” Jeremy said.

“Jet? Oh. Probably one of those puddle jumpers that one must use to get off the beaten paths. Now here’s an interesting group of—”

“Could I talk to you a minute, Martin?” Anne said, interrupting him. “Outside?”

“Certainly.” He pushed back his chair and handed the mouse to Jeremy. “Just keep left-clicking,” he said. “I’m not sure, but this may be the file where I came across some nubile young women bathing in a river. Very naughty of me to take their pictures before they realized a man was within miles, but you may be amused.”

He stood and followed Anne, who had already grabbed up her coat and opened the door, letting in a welcome wave of fresh air.

Once they were out on the porch, she turned to him and said, “What the hell’s going on?”

“Going on? You asked me to speak to the lad about my work.”

“You’re supposed to be filling him with enthusiasm for a rewarding craft. The adventure of travel. The dollars and cents of selling an article. Instead, you’re narrating a very bad travelogue and putting us both to sleep.”

Her cousin looked offended and stepped onto the ground so that he could sit on the edge of the porch. The pasture that spread out and away before them was a palette of subtle browns and burnt sienna. Tufts of pale yellow broomstraw and patches of dried weeds with dead flower heads waved in the light breeze that blew up from the creek. Dark green pines swayed majestically in the distance and the pasture itself was dotted with tiny green seedlings. In another few years, those pine seedlings would reclaim this pasture if no one mowed it or built houses out here.

At the bottom of the slope, two large vultures were perched on the ruined masonry wall that stuck up from one side of that concrete slab. Two more circled overhead.

“You’re acting like a caricature of a pompous British colonial,” Anne told him. “I almost expect you to say, ‘Pip, pip, old chap,’ or ‘Cheerio!’ Naughty of you? Oh, please. If you didn’t want to talk to him, why didn’t you just say so?”

“I could hardly say no when I’m using your mother’s hospitality to gather material for my article, now could I?”

“No is all you’ve been saying since we got here, beginning with that disgusting odor you’re wearing,” said Anne, who had carefully positioned herself upwind from him.

“Eau de vulture vomit?” He chuckled. “They do insist on regurgitating on me if I’m not careful when I handle them.”

“You handle them?”

He realized instantly that he had slipped and smoothly recovered. “I’ve banded a couple, yes. I thought I’d leave the information with the local wildlife service in case they wish to follow up on my observations. But you’re right and I apologize for my behavior. I’ve got a lot on my mind right now. My editor’s getting impatient, so I’m hoping to wrap this part up by the weekend and get back to England to finish writing the article and edit my photographs.”

Anne had dealt with enough cranky editors over the years to sympathize.

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll let you off the hook for Jeremy, but you have to come to dinner again before you leave. Mother has a few small family things she wants you to have.”

“Done,” he said.



The keyboard of Martin Crawford’s laptop might have been in Arabic, but arrows are international symbols, and as soon as Crawford and Anne Harald went outside, Jeremy Harper slid the cursor to that top row of thumbnails and clicked the left arrow until he came to the file with an airplane, then clicked to open it. The screen filled with more tiny pictures and it took him a moment to realize what he was looking at.

With one eye on the computer and the other on the window that let him see the two adults, he pulled a jump drive out of his pocket and inserted it in the computer’s USB port. A few more clicks and that file was copied and the jump drive back in his pocket.

When Anne Harald returned with her smelly dull cousin, he made himself look like the clueless nerdy kid they seemed to think he was, ogling the pictures of naked young women splashing in a jungle pool.



As soon as his cousin and her do-good project left, Martin Crawford stripped off and put those befouled trousers out on the porch. With a little luck he would never have to wear them again. He filled a basin with warm water from the kettle and scrubbed himself until all the stench was gone. Dressed again in clean clothes from the skin out, he opened both the front and back doors to let cold fresh air blow through the whole house.

All credit to Anne and the boy, he thought, still surprised that they hadn’t left the instant they got a whiff of him.

But he was getting careless. Not merely that slip of the tongue with Anne, but leaving his computer alone with that boy. Happily, the screen appeared to be as he’d left it, and his mail program was password-protected had Jeremy tried to open it. Nevertheless, it had been a stupid mistake.

Especially now, when everything was coming to a head.