“You’re not going to try to drive back to Widdington tonight, are you?” he asked.
“Don’t worry,” said Kayra. “Grandma’s expecting us to spend the night with them.”
We gave them directions for driving across the farm by back lanes and then on dirt roads so as to avoid most of the dangerously slick paved roads that lay between our farm and the Bryant farm.
Dwight made sure that they had our phone number in case they slid into a ditch along the way, but Nolan assured me they’d be fine. “I’ve got four-wheel drive on my Jeep.”
“Four-wheel drive doesn’t do a thing if all four wheels are on ice,” I told him.
Kayra laughed and gave Dwight a good-bye hug. I got one, too.
“Nice kids,” I said, leaning into Dwight’s bulk for a windbreak as we watched the taillights from both cars disappear down the lane.
“Yeah,” he said. “Too bad they’re wasting their Christmas holidays on a wild-goose chase.”
While he went to take a hot shower in the old bathroom, I gathered up spoons and coffee mugs and started the dishwasher. When I put Brix Junior’s files back in the boxes, I noticed a scrap of paper on the floor under the table where it had fallen out of one of the folders. It was a short list of case law citations that Brix Junior probably intended to read up on. In the margin, he had scribbled a name followed by three question marks: “Deenie Gates???”
Deenie Gates.
Now why did that name sound familiar? It might have been a name out of the case law citings, but somehow I doubted it.
Then Dwight called to me from the bedroom. I slid the paper into the end folder and never gave it another thought that night.
CHAPTER 15
Florence Hartley,
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 14
When Mayleen Richards walked into the DA’s suite of offices that morning, she learned that an SBI agent had been there the afternoon before and that Tracy Johnson’s CPU tower was now at their Garner facility, undergoing a full lobotomy. Officially, the two agencies were cooperating fully, but Richards was competitive enough to want the Colleton County Sheriff’s Department to get credit for bringing the killer to justice. And if she could be the one to actually crack the case, all the better. It would prove to Major Bryant that he’d been right in keeping her on the job.
“Not to worry,” said Julie Walsh, who had blown in right behind her with an ornate Christmas wreath on her arm. Pink-cheeked from the icy December wind that whipped through the open parking lot on the north side of the courthouse, the young ADA hung her red wool coat and plaid scarf on the office coatrack and gave the detective a reassuring smile as she positioned the wreath on the wall above her desk, where its silver tinsel glittered with every stray current of air from the heating vents below. “Tracy was a suspenders-and-belt person. She backed up everything.”
“Yeah, I noticed her box of floppies,” Richards said glumly, looking at a now empty space on the desk, “but they must have taken those, too.”
“I’m not talking about computer backups.” Walsh opened the bottom two drawers of a four-drawer gray metal file cabinet that separated her desk from her murdered colleague’s. “These were Tracy’s. She preferred paper to a screen whenever she worked on something complicated.”
“You show these to the state agents?”
“I wasn’t here and I don’t think they asked any of the others.”
Richards quickly scanned the tabs on the manila folders tucked neatly into hanging files and pulled out random sheets. They seemed to be the personal notes and worksheets from past cases that Tracy Johnson had prosecuted during her time with Doug Woodall. The clerk of court’s office said that Johnson had borrowed the trial documents on Martha Hurst, but she did not appear to have filed any notes on it here.
“What about her current cases?”
“Mr. Woodall’s spreading them around to the rest of us till he can hire a replacement for her. Brandon Frazier and I are trying to reconstruct the game plan for a drug case coming up on Thursday, but if y’all can’t find Don Whitley . . .”
“Yeah, I know,” said Richards.
“Where you reckon he’s gone?”
“Dammit all, Sheriff,” said Doug Woodall.
The DA had found Dwight Bryant and Bowman Poole conferring in Poole’s office and he was out for blood, waving aside their genial invitation to pull up a chair and how about a cup of coffee?
“We’re pushing the limit now on the rules about speedy trials. Tracy already got three continuances and Judge O’Donnell says he won’t grant another. We don’t take this Ruiz to trial day after tomorrow, we’re going to have to cut him loose. Let him walk. It’s bad enough we have to proceed without her, but there’s no point even starting without that deputy. We don’t have him, we don’t have linkage. So where the hell is he?”
Sheriff Poole paused on his way to refill his mug from the carafe atop a corner bookcase and drew himself up to his full five foot seven. Despite their difference in height, he somehow managed to make the taller man feel two inches shorter.
“You think we’re waiting for him to phone in, Mr. Woodall? We put out an APB on him yesterday. We talked to his mama over in Widdington. We’ve got somebody watching his place here in Dobbs and we’ve just sent someone over there to search it. You got a suggestion what else we need to be doing, let’s hear it.”
“Now, Bo, don’t get your back up,” the DA said placatingly. Bo Poole’s power base in the county was even stronger than his. Only a fool would alienate someone who could make the party give more than lip service when he
