the table was only one layer deep, and there were even a few open spaces between an up-to-date wanted poster and some cryptic memos to himself.
His tackle box was always just that neat. No broken lures, no flutter of leaders, weights, or feathers.
On the opposite wall, the head-high bookcase was empty except for a row of looseleaf notebooks on the bottom shelf and some framed pictures of Stanton on the top shelf. He’d be about fifteen now, and of the three of us, he’d changed most of all, if the pictures were any indication-a young man all of a sudden and not a little kid anymore.
“ Stanton ’s getting handsomer all the time,” I said, picking up the wood-framed photograph on his desk. When Terry started to beam, I added, “Must take after his mother.”
“Like hell! Everybody says he’s me all over again.”
“What’s he up to these days?” I asked, truly wanting to know. I liked Stanton from the beginning. He lived with his mother, Terry’s first wife, and I knew he looked forward to weekends with Terry, yet he’d never seemed to mind when I came fishing with them.
“Doing real good. Plays shortstop on the varsity baseball team. Carrying a good solid B, too,” he bragged.
I put the picture back on his desk. “Starting to break a few hearts?”
The tip of his nose twitched. “Like I told you-he’s me all over again.”
“You wish!”
We talked trash a few minutes more before I broached Janie Whitehead’s murder and explained why I was asking.
“That was before my time,” Terry said, and without sitting up, he stretched across to snag a slim folder from the rack neatly aligned with the far edge of his desk. “I believe Scotty Underhill worked that case.”
He leafed through the eight or nine sheets in the file folder. From where I sat, I couldn’t make out specific words, but it looked like a condensed printout of all the unsolved cases assigned to Terry’s MUST team: names, dates, a one- or two-sentence description of each case and some comment as to any solvability factors.
“When was the last time it was worked?” I asked.
“Seven years ago,” he murmured, still reading.
The MUST force was developed only four years earlier.
“You didn’t rework it when you took over?”
“Oh, come on, Deborah,” he said. “I’ve got eight men and over two hundred cases. Janie Whitehead’s murder was thoroughly worked at the beginning and Scotty went back and poked around some more back in eighty-three. Nada.”
I vaguely remembered a flurry of hushed talk around Cotton Grove in the spring of 1983, but I hadn’t paid it much mind, especially since it died down almost as soon as it began. “And no suspects either time?”
Terry closed the folder and replaced it in the rack. “Now you know well and good I wouldn’t name names if we had any, which, as a matter of fact, we don’t. You can ask Scotty yourself if you want.”
He glanced at his watch. “I’m supposed to meet him at six. Want to come along?”
Miss Molly’s Bar and Grill on South Wilmington Street hadn’t changed all that much since I was last there with Terry. A few more neon beer brands had been added to the already crowded walls and I saw that Spot had finally found him that old blue guitar he’d been looking for last time we talked about his collection of neon signs. He hadn’t taken Little Richard and Elvis off the jukebox, but Randy Travis and Reba McEntire were there now, too.
Spot acted glad to see me.
“The usual,” Terry said as we passed the bar.
“You still drinking gin and tonics?” Spot asked me.
“Yeah, only make it a virgin,” I told him. “I’ve got to drive to Makely tonight.”
“Getting old, kid?” Terry needled.
“Getting cautious. All I need’s a headline in the Dobbs Ledger: ‘Judicial Candidate Cited for DWI.’ ”
We headed back to the big round table at the rear, which had always been populated by law people. That hadn’t changed much either.
I recognized two homicide detectives from the Raleigh PD, a couple of SBI arson investigators, and someone from the attorney general’s office, all males if no longer all white. We’d barely reached the table when a familiar whiff of musky perfume overtook me and I felt light fingers on my shoulder.
“Deborah? That you? Well, hey, gal! How you been? Where you been? God, it’s been ages!”
I turned and there was Morgan Slavin, a blur of long blonde hair, long gorgeous legs, and the clearest, brightest blue eyes south of Finland. We hugged and grinned at each other and found chairs while she pulled out a pack of Virginia Slims and lit up, talking all the while.
“You remember Max, don’t you? And Simon? And, hey, Jasp! Lacy know you’ve slipped your chain?”
Last time I saw Morgan she looked like one of those skinny, white trash motorcycle mamas-tight jeans, denim jacket studded with red-white-and-blue glass nailheads, no makeup, hair skinned back under a baseball cap, and flying high. She’d just infiltrated the busiest crack house in the Triangle and was waiting for the warrants and backups to get there before she closed it down.
Big change from the high heels and chic teal suit she wore this evening.
“Busting corporation types now?” I queried as we pulled out adjacent chairs.
“Naw. This is how supervisors dress.” She poked Terry’s shoulder. “Less’n you’ve got one of them Y chromosomes.”
“Always bragging about double Xs,” Terry grumbled. “Only reason they promoted you.”
“Hey, that’s great,” I said. “Congratulations.”
“Thank you, thank you,” she said with mock modesty. “And you’re going to be a judge, I hear?”
I held up crossed fingers as Spot arrived with a tray of drinks. Morgan was still drinking scotch on the rocks and the other men had beers, but I lifted my brows at the can of Diet Pepsi and glass of ice cubes that Spot placed in front of Terry.
“Getting old, Terry?” I mocked, squeezing the slice of lime into my tonic water.
“ Stanton ’s got a game tonight.”
“Yeah, sure.” I was going to let him get away with it, but then he remembered I’d heard him order “the usual” and he raised the can sheepishly.
Across the table, the men were trading war stories.
“Y’all work that Smithfield warehouse last week?” Terry asked.
They nodded and Morgan laughed with delight. “You hear about that one, Deborah?”
I shook my head and leaned back and waited for it.
SBI agents have to be brave, cheerful, thrifty, loyal, and all those other Boy Scout virtues, but I sometimes wondered if an SBI director hadn’t added “warped sense of humor” to the job description somewhere along the line.
“Tell her, Max,” said Morgan, acting like a big sister pushing her little brother out to show off
Max was the agent directly across who’d been coming on to me with those big brown eyes ever since I sat down.
“These two guys got a contract to burn out an old dilapidated tobacco warehouse over in Smithfield, see? Insurance scam. You sure you didn’t read about it?”
I shook my head. Smithfield was in Johnston, a county that touched Colleton but wasn’t in my judicial district.
“They had the preliminary hearing yesterday, and one of the perpetrators copped a plea and blamed it all on his partner. He just carried the can, he says, and it was his Dumbo partner who sloshed around all that gas. And it was Dumbo that made the Pall Mall fuse. You know what that is, don’t you?”
Actually I did, but he was cute and wanted to stretch it out.
“It’s a delay device,” he explained, taking his own cigarette from the ashtray and threading the unlit end through a book of matches. “See, tobacco burns at approximately 350 degrees Fahrenheit. I could burn this cigarette all day long and never set off gas vapors because it takes between 550 and 850 degrees to ignite them. Now this cigarette’ll take about ten minutes to burn down to the match heads, giving me time to get back here to Miss Molly’s and establish my alibi. The match heads’ll ignite at less than 350 degrees and generate enough fire and heat to set the paper on fire. The paper will generate up to 1,000 degrees and that’s finally hot enough to ignite the vapors, see?”
