Rituals of the Season

“My cock’s bigger than yours?” I murmured.

“Exactly,” she said.

CHAPTER 7

The real charity is to keep servants steadily to their duties. Their work should be measured out with a just hand; but it should be regularly exacted in as much perfection as can be expected in variable and erring human nature.

Florence Hartley, The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette, 1873

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 12

When Dwight got to the DA’s office on the second floor of the courthouse, one of Doug Woodall’s assistants, Brandon Frazier, was waiting for him with a stack of manila file folders. “So far as I know, these are all the cases she was working on as of Friday,” he said.

“Which was her desk?” Dwight asked.

“There,” said Frazier, pointing to the one under a window that overlooked the courthouse parking lot.

The huge oaks that would shade cars in the summer were stripped bare of leaves this mild December morning. Only a few cars in the lot today. He watched as one of his detectives, Mayleen Richards, drove in, parked, and crossed the street, where she passed from his view. He made a mental note to get Richards to use her computer expertise to pull the records on Tracy Johnson’s computer. He knew how to use the machines for day-to-day tasks, but that was as far as it went.

He switched Tracy’s on, but her files were password-protected and Frazier couldn’t tell him what it was, so he shut it down again.

Like everyone else to whom Dwight had spoken so far, Brandon Frazier claimed to know little about his colleague’s personal life.

“Hell, man—I don’t know if she even had a personal life, you know what I mean? Some of us were talking last night at Jerry’s, wondering if Tracy had anything going on the weekends or evenings. Nobody knew. I mean, she was friendly and all. She’d go out for drinks after work before she adopted Mei, but she was still in her new-mom mode.”

Something bitter in the tone of his voice made Dwight remember that Frazier and his wife had split a couple of months after the birth of their own baby. Too much attention to the baby on the wife’s part? Jealousy on his? His own wife had been like that when Cal was born, but by then he’d known the marriage was a mistake, so it didn’t matter to him that Jonna gave all her attention to their son. Took enough pressure off him that, for a while there, he thought they could make a go of it, that both of them loving Cal would make up for not loving each other.

“She’d talk about the baby,” Frazier said, “or if somebody brought up a television program or a basketball game she’d seen, she’d join in, but mostly it was about work.”

“Good-looking woman like her, you not married—y’all never hooked up?”

Frazier shrugged. “Wasn’t for me not trying. When I was still in private practice, she wouldn’t go out with me because it might be a conflict of interest, her prosecuting my clients, you know? And then when I came over here, she still wouldn’t go out with me. Said she wanted to keep her professional life separate from her personal. Well, she sure did that, didn’t she? She was a damn good prosecutor, though. I hope Doug finds somebody else right away because it’s going to be rough taking up her slack.”

“Who was tight with her here in the courthouse?” Dwight asked as he opened the desk drawers.

Frazier watched him poke through paper clips, rulers, pens, staples—the usual office supplies that clutter everyone’s desk. Except for an envelope of baby pictures, some cosmetics, a box of tampons, and a stash of foil- wrapped butterscotch candies, it could be his own desk.

“I don’t know that anybody was particularly tight with her, but I think she and Julie usually wound up eating lunch together most days when they were both in the building.”

Julie would be Julie Walsh, another ADA.

“Enemies?” asked Dwight, holding to the light a silver-framed picture of Mei in a little ruffled bathing suit and matching chartreuse sunglasses. He and Deborah had never discussed children. Did she want one of her own? For that matter, did he want another? He set the picture down gently. “We heard she got a death threat recently.”

Frazier obligingly looked up the name and present location of the prisoner who had recently threatened her and was now serving time at a prison farm in the next county.

“Nobody took him seriously, though. He was just pissed that Tracy gave the jury a solid case and wouldn’t cut a deal.”

“What about Martha Hurst?” Dwight asked.

“Who?”

Dwight explained and Frazier just shook his head. “Sorry. I was still living in Tennessee back then.”

As Dwight opened the top files and began to scan through Tracy’s current workload, Frazier said, “What about her Palm Pilot?”

“Her what?” Dwight said absently, already absorbed in the case against some dumbass who had robbed a Wendy’s as one of his deputies was ordering a hamburger at the drive-through and then shot and wounded a customer.

“Her electronic scheduler and address book.”

“Oh, right. Y’all find it?”

“It’s not here at the office. Everybody says she carried it in her purse. She would’ve had it with her when she was killed.”

Sitting at her desk in the Colleton County Sheriff’s Department shortly before eleven this Sunday morning, Deputy Mayleen Richards looked over her notes for the briefing session Major Bryant had scheduled, and wished she had more to give him.

A tall and sturdily built woman who had just turned thirty-three, Richards had cinnamon brown hair and a