Jack Jamison’s one of the new detectives he’s training and Percy Denning is Colleton County’s crime scene specialist.
“What now?” I asked as he holstered his gun and reached for the heavy winter jacket hanging on a peg by the door.
“The wreck wasn’t an accident,” he said. “The EMTs say Tracy was shot.”
Dwight shrugged. “The ROs say it looks like a deliberate act.”
ROs—responding officers.
“Why?”
“Won’t know till I get there, shug.” He zipped his jacket, gave me a quick kiss and was gone.
CHAPTER 2
Florence Hartley,
After Dwight left, I changed into jeans, pulled one of his old sweatshirts over my red silk turtleneck, and tuned the radio to a station playing Christmas carols. While the Mormon Tabernacle Choir sang of peace on earth, good will to men, I browned the chuck that I had picked up at a grocery store in Makely. I’ll never be a gourmet cook, but I do okay with the basics and Dwight’s not likely to starve to death, no matter what some people think.
The smells of well-browned onions and carrots soon filled the efficiency apartment. Beef stew is good cold- weather comfort food, and if Dwight was going to be late, prolonged simmering would only enhance the flavors.
The simple act of cooking usually mellows me out. Not tonight, though. Not even with the seasonal music and the stiff Jack Daniel’s I had poured myself. As I sliced and browned and stirred, I kept picturing Tracy slumped over her steering wheel on some frozen stretch of I-95.
Not a hunting accident, the first officers on the scene had told Dwight. So who?
And why?
Back before I ran for the bench, Tracy and I had been natural antagonists—I as a defense attorney, she a brand-new prosecutor with a something-to-prove chip on her shoulder and the preponderance of the law on her side. But we hung with the same crowd, saw some of the same guys, and occasionally reached for the same pair of shoes when Fancy Footwork held their seasonal sales. She was way too tall for the high heels we both adored and she grumbled about how some male judges will subconsciously let their judgments be colored if a woman towers over them, but when three-inch apple green slingbacks call to you in the spring, it’s hard to react logically.
A boy soprano sang “O Holy Night” in a high pure voice, and memories of Tracy crowded my mind: evenings at Miss Molly’s on South Wilmington Street in Raleigh before she adopted Mei and quit dropping by smoke-filled cop bars on Friday nights. Trading war stories, the drinks, the laughter. I remembered how she’d bought a round for the house the first time she got a death threat from a felon she’d sent to prison. We’d even gone to a concert over in Greensboro together with a couple of SBI agents we’d met at Miss Molly’s. She went out with the good-looking one several times and then he dropped her for a little five-foot-nothing blonde who made him feel big and strong in a way Tracy never could. In fact, now that I thought about it, he was probably the last straw before she decided to adopt.
Back in the spring, after I broke up with a game warden from down east, we sat next to each other at our local district bar association dinner and I was moaning to her about the dearth of good men. She had smiled and said, “But you know what? When you quit looking, suddenly they’re right under your nose.”
“Tell! Tell!” I’d demanded, but she’d just smiled again and kept her own counsel, which made me pretty certain that she was seeing someone. Mutual friends seemed to have the same impression, but since no one had a name and since Tracy always started talking about Mei the minute anybody asked about her love life, I hadn’t pursued it.
Now I wondered. More women are killed by husbands or lovers than total strangers. Could this be a love affair gone horribly wrong? If she’d been in a relationship, though, why keep it secret?
Because he was married?
Not hardly likely, as my Aunt Sister would say. Yes, propinquity can sneak up on you and clobber you over the head when you’re not looking, make you do things you never thought you would, but Tracy had been a levelheaded realist and I’d heard her speak scornfully of such couplings too many times to think she wouldn’t have made propinquity zip its pants the minute it started breathing heavily.
On the other hand, between work and Mei, when would she have had time to get involved with a complete stranger? I thought of the other men in Doug Woodall’s office. Chubby little Chester Nance, who’d run against me my first campaign? He’s at least two inches shorter than Tracy and appears to be happily married.
Certainly not Doug himself. Even though he just turned forty, our DA has a no-nonsense wife who is famous for advising newlywed paralegals, “Sugar, you want to keep him on the straight and narrow, you keep him too dick-sore to even
(Around the courthouse, it’s a given that Mary Jess Woodall effectively practices what she preaches.)
Which brought us to Brandon Frazier. He left a mediocre private practice to work for Doug after Cyl DeGraffenried resigned. Now, he could be a possibility: divorced, no children, lean, intense, dark hair, smoldering navy blue eyes. Hairy as a shag rug, though, judging by his wrists and the back of his hands. Not my taste—except for a few stray hairs in the middle, Dwight’s chest is fairly smooth—but maybe the caveman look was a turn-on for Tracy.
Or was her death something to do with her work as a prosecutor? Doug rotates his staff through both courts, the DWIs
