percolating through the trailers when they opened the unlocked door, he had been dead for at least a day and probably longer. Beside the body lay a bloody aluminum softball bat, its handle wiped clean of fingerprints.
According to the medical examiner’s straightforward report, death came from massive trauma to the victim’s skull with a blunt instrument consistent with the bat. The first blow had probably come from the front while he was either sitting or standing. The others were to the back of his head after he was prone. He had then been turned over and his genitals pounded to a pulp, probably immediately postmortem and probably with the end of the same blunt instrument. Based on the ambient temperature as recorded by the detectives who arrived soon after the first responding officer and on the deterioration of the body, death had occurred three to six days earlier. In other words, sometime between the preceding Saturday and Tuesday.
The trailer belonged to a Gene and Martha Hurst. Gene Hurst, age forty-nine, was a long-distance van driver for a national moving company. Although family members are the usual suspects, he was meticulously alibied. He had left Raleigh on Friday morning, picked up the rest of his load in Nashville on Saturday morning, and headed west for Tucson and Phoenix.
I studied photocopies of the time-stamped tickets that plotted Gene Hurst’s drive from one weigh station to another across the width of the country. They showed that he’d pulled out of Nashville around the time his son was last seen on Saturday morning.
Martha Hurst was a different matter. A thirty-four-year-old hospital aide, she claimed that she had only briefly seen her stepson that morning and never again. Okay, yes, they’d had a violent argument and she’d threatened to break his head, but that was because he’d come over and let himself in while she was taking a shower after he swore he’d given back all the keys from when he used to share the trailer with his dad before they were married.
“How would you feel if you walked out of the shower buck naked and there was a man standing in your bedroom?” she’d asked Brix Junior.
When Brix Junior delicately reminded her that she and the younger Hurst had been lovers before she married his father and that he might possibly have seen her buck naked before, Martha Hurst had said yes, and that was all the more reason for him to get the hell out of her house and out of her life.
As for the rest of Saturday, she had come home from her ball game around six, stood her bats and glove in a rack by the front door, and then taken another shower before going out to celebrate the win. And yes, she might’ve had too much to drink, especially after she discovered that the rings she’d left on her dresser before the game had gone missing; and yes, she might have told her teammates that she wanted to bust his head like a ripe watermelon, but she certainly hadn’t gone home and done it, because he wasn’t there and she couldn’t run him down by telephone. Next morning, she had left for a week at the beach with friends.
No, she had most certainly
That was one bit of evidence in her favor, and I added it to the notes on my legal pad because Martha Hurst certainly sounded like a woman who wouldn’t hesitate to go through a man’s pockets looking for her missing rings. The rings weren’t there, but a pawn ticket was.
The photos of the crime scene were extremely detailed. Every angle of the room had been covered and the body was so well-documented that I could see the maggots on his head and pants and almost read the pawn ticket. There was even a clear print of a bloody dent in the wall, beneath the light switch and thermostat, where the bat had evidently glanced off Hurst’s head on the first swing.
With such an uncertain time of death—Saturday till Tuesday—it was hard for everyone to prove conclusively where they were, but of the other two strong candidates, one was in jail from Friday night till noon on Monday, when he was conveyed to Buxton for a full mental health evaluation, and the other could prove he was in Charlotte from Saturday morning till Wednesday.
It was hard to think of killing your stepson and ex-lover and then going blithely off to the beach for a week, but murderers have done weirder things and Martha Hurst did have a history of violence. She had quit high school when she punched out a teacher she said was hassling her; and after completing a GED, she’d lost her first job at a private nursing home because she’d hit her supervisor over the head with a metal bedpan.
A full metal bedpan.
From all the reports and witness statements, it would appear that Martha Hurst had been accused because of her angry threats against her stepson, even though she swore she hadn’t seen him again after her admitted run-in with him around midday on that Saturday.
I was leafing through a final sheaf of Brix Junior’s handwritten notes when Dwight came into the kitchen, rumpled and yawning.
“Couldn’t resist it, could you, shug?” he said.
I smiled up at him. “If you really didn’t want me to read these files, you wouldn’t have brought them in the house, would you?”
He gave me a quizzical glance. “I thought we agreed that we were going to keep our work separate?”
“We are,” I promised. “You know well and good that nothing about Tracy’s death is ever going to come up in district court.”
He took a pilsner glass from the cabinet. “So you can meddle in my work, but I can’t meddle in yours?”
“That’s different,” I said. “Your department generates a lot of my cases.”
Taking care not to touch where April had so recently painted, Dwight opened the armoire doors to the beer tap Daddy had given him, drew himself a foaming glassful, and held it up to the light in critical appraisal as he always does. Dwight takes the craft of beer-making seriously and keeps a notebook filled with observations about each batch. Some of the recipes he’s developed are as complicated as any chemical formula, with their eighth of an ounce of this and a half-teaspoon of that. The color on this one was a dark golden brown and the head was so thick and creamy that after his first swallow, the rim of the glass was edged in an inch-wide band of foam.
“Brussels lace?” I asked, having picked up some of the terminology.
“Pretty, isn’t it?” he said with a touch of pride as he pulled out a chair opposite me. A sweet malty aroma drifted across the table. He took another swallow of the ale and leaned back in his chair so that his muscular, six- three body was almost horizontal and only the back legs touched the floor.
“So tell me about Martha Hurst.”
