Rituals of the Season

“Martha Hurst? Oh, yes. She asked me to pull the files last week. Some third-year law student at Eastern was reviewing the case for his law clinic.”

“You know his name?” asked Richards.

The clerk frowned in concentration. “Norman? Newton? No, that’s not right. Something like that, though.”

Richards sighed. Well, how many third-year law students at Eastern with a name like Norman or Newton could there be?

Jack Jamison stood to stretch his arms over his head and flex his shoulders after two hours hunched over the phone bills and his computer screen. Jones had finished talking to everyone who answered the phone and had gone out for a smoke. Jamison looked through the windows to the opposite squad room where Castleman labored over his own computer screen. He started to call to him, then vetoed the idea. Instead he gathered up the bills and notes he’d made and walked down to Major Bryant’s office. The door was ajar and when he cleared his throat, Bryant looked up.

“Talk to you a minute, sir?”

“Sure, Jack. What you got?”

“Well, it might not mean anything. I mean, there was a logical reason for them to talk, but this much?”

He laid Tracy Johnson’s cell phone bills on the desk before his boss and pointed to the lines he’d highlighted. “Look at the times, sir. Some of these calls are pretty late at night.”

At that moment, Bo Poole stuck his head in the door. “What’s up with Whitley? He’s not answering his pager and Doug Woodall’s all over my ass about him.”

“I’ll put out an APB right away,” said Dwight.

“APB?” The sheriff started to laugh, then realized Dwight wasn’t joking. “A little extreme, don’t you think? We don’t need to treat him like a criminal just because he flubbed a briefing.”

“Yeah, I think we do,” Dwight told him.

“Hey, Major?”

Mike Castleman spoke over Bo Poole’s shoulder. His jaw was clenched and his voice was tight.

“Later,” said Dwight.

“No, sir. I’m sorry, sir, but you need to come look at my computer right now.”

They followed him to his desk in the empty squad room.

“I was catching up on my messages and there’s one from Whitley.”

He moved the mouse, clicked it, and a message dated the night before appeared on the screen.

Sorry, pal, but I can’t do this anymore. Wish there was another solution, but there isn’t. Don

Grim-faced, Bo Poole turned to Dwight. “Do it,” he said. “Now.”

CHAPTER 13

We must work for our heavenly peace on earth. The mental discipline, to prosper, must be aided by divine grace, but it must spring from our own hearts.

Florence Hartley, The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette, 1873

Here in eastern North Carolina weather forecasters get downright giddy at the faintest possibility of snow; and the closer we get to Christmas, the more they massage their satellite photos to show how a system that could maybe— maybe—bring possible flurries might actually hang around long enough to blanket us by the twenty-fifth. Despite the hopeful chatter on television last night, we almost never get snow in December, but freezing rains were a distinct possibility. In the belief that the tires of rush-hour traffic would help keep the main roads from turning into sheets of greased glass, Dwight made me promise before I left home Monday morning that I’d head on back as soon as I adjourned court.

On the drive down to Makely, my mood was almost as bleak as the cold gray clouds that filled the sky. It wasn’t just gloomy thoughts about Tracy, Mei, and the unborn baby either.

I was due to testify in superior court sometime today in the trial of a former colleague. I usually have reliable instincts about people, but Russell Moore had foxed a lot of people besides me. He was a big, good-natured country boy who’d pulled himself up by his own bootstraps, worked his way through college, went to law school at night, then, spurred on by the grinding poverty of his childhood, opened a one-man practice in Makely, determined to succeed. He played hard, but he worked hard, too, and was particularly good with juries, who tended to trust him implicitly. Hell, we all did. And why not? He was just like an overgrown Saint Bernard puppy, still something of a farmboy, awed by how far he’d come from the tobacco fields. But then he did an out-of-court settlement with an insurance company on behalf of a client.

A hundred-thousand-dollar settlement.

Only he didn’t tell his client.

By the time he was indicted, he’d made at least three more similar settlements. That wasn’t how he got caught, though. He got caught because he forged my name on a DWI judgment that allowed his middle-class client to get a restricted license. Said client was so happy that he could continue driving himself back and forth to work that he bragged about it in the wrong place, and when another attorney asked for something similar for one of his clients, I pulled the record to refresh my memory and immediately realized that it wasn’t my signature on the form. My courtroom clerk said that wasn’t her signature either.

Once Russell had drawn attention to himself like that, it took only a cursory examination of his records to discover the embezzlements.

Disbarred and disgraced, he was now on trial and I was a witness for the State. And yeah, I know that there are very few attorneys up for sainthood—there’s a reason for all those crooked-lawyer jokes—and yes, they’re expected to argue a client’s innocence when, in their heart of hearts, they suspect he’s guilty as hell. They may not be held to the spirit of the law, but they’re damned well supposed to uphold the letter of it.