The Buzzard Table

CHAPTER

28


Turkey vultures can often be seen near rivers, feasting on washed-up fish.

—The Turkey Vulture Society



Dwight 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.