“Oh. Well, yes. I guess. Don’t ask me who, though, because she never talked to me about him, but I think they might’ve been having a fight because last Monday we came in and there was this jeweler’s box on her desk and when she opened it, it was a gold-and-turquoise bracelet that matched some earrings someone—maybe him?— gave her for her birthday in October. She went ballistic about it. I mean, if it’d been a dishwasher or something, I could understand. My dad gave my mom a dishwasher for one of their anniversaries and she didn’t speak to him for like six weeks. But this was jewelry, for pete’s sake. In her colors. She really liked turquoise, you know?”
“She got mad because he gave her jewelry?”
“Yeah.” Walsh grinned. “Maybe she really wanted a dishwasher.”
“Wait a minute. You said the box was here on her desk? How did it get here?”
The young ADA looked blank. “I never thought about that. It was just there. Gee. Somebody in our office?”
Richards could almost see her brain working as it ran through her colleagues here in the DA’s office.
“No, I don’t think so. Somebody would’ve said something. Maybe one of the attorneys in town? They’re in and out all the time.”
“I don’t suppose you noticed the box? What store it came from?”
“Sorry. It’s not like she passed it around. The only reason I saw it at all was because I was standing right here when she found it.”
Richards shoved a pad and pen toward her. “Can you draw what it looked like?”
“I don’t know.”
Hesitantly, Julie Walsh sketched a wide silver cuff. “And there were like little rectangles of turquoise spaced along the edge.” She indicated the stones with small dashes. “It might’ve had more but I didn’t get a good look. She barely looked at it herself before she snapped the lid closed again. She didn’t put it on then and I never saw her wearing it. Maybe she gave it back?”
All during this time, Richards had been trying variations of the previous passwords. She jotted down yet another sequence of numbers after M-E-I, keyed them in, hit the enter key, and suddenly an alphabetized directory of files filled the screen.
“Oh wow!” said Walsh. “You did it.”
Richards ran the cursor up and down the rows. She opened Johnson’s computerized address book and skimmed through it, but nothing leaped out at her. It read like the courthouse directory: names, addresses, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses of attorneys, ADAs, deputies, and highway patrol officers that she’d worked with. Richards’s own name was there. So was Major Bryant’s.
And Judge Knott’s.
Some of the names had personal data entered in the notes section—birthdays, children’s names, alternate phone numbers. Judge Knott’s had “marrying DB 12/22.”
Unbidden came the fresh memory of the way the two had looked at each other last night. Richards’s heart wrenched as she recalled the easy familiarity with which the judge had touched the major’s hair, had held his hand, had fitted herself into the crook of his arm as they left Jerry’s.
In a file labeled “Medical,” she found the names and addresses of Johnson’s ob-gyn and Mei’s pediatrician along with a log of office visits, copayments, and reasons for the visits. Nothing unusual for either of them.
Nor was her e-mail account for this computer difficult to open. Again, all the messages seemed to pertain to her job here.
Going up one level, she discovered one more folder lurking among the system files. It was labeled “Personal.” To her dismay, it was protected by a different password and none of the MEI variations seemed to work.
“Maybe she used her own name,” suggested Julie Walsh, who had been watching over her shoulder.
Richards tried the usual combinations. Nothing.
Frustrated, she pushed back in the chair and looked up at the younger woman. “Did she ever mention Martha Hurst to you?”
“Not really. I heard her ask one of the clerks to pull the files on it, though.”
Nearing retirement, gray-haired, and carrying seventy pounds over what he’d weighed when he first joined the department right before Bo Poole got himself elected, Deputy Silas Lee Jones reflected that it was a fine howdy-do when you had to ask witnesses if they’d seen something you couldn’t rightly describe yourself.
Cell phones he understood, but Palm Pilots?
“What the hell’s a Palm Pilot?” he asked plaintively after Major Bryant tracked him down at the coffee machine and gave him the assignment.
Castleman and Jamison explained all the things one could do with it.
Jones gave a disgusted snort. “Sounds like more trouble than it’s worth,” he said as he dialed the first name on the list collected at the crash site Friday night.
“No,” said the witness. “I didn’t notice a Palm Pilot, just her cell phone. It was in a holder on the dash, right next to that poor woman’s head. Front end smashed to hell and gone and the light was still on in the charger.”
“Oh crap,” Jones said to the others. “One of those bastards stole her cell phone, too.”
The clerk was forty-four and fighting it. She was rail thin, her hair an artful strawberry blond, and her pink eye shadow matched the pink of the long-sleeved silk blouse she wore with formfitting black slacks and stacked shoes.