here then either.”
“I heard about it though. A five-year-old? Went missing from her grandmother’s backyard?”
“Yeah. Three weeks before we found her body. Tore everybody up something awful. We were stretched thinner than an elephant’s rubber that summer.” He sighed and leaned back in his leather chair. “You gonna look into this Hurst business?”
“I think we have to.”
Faded blue eyes met dark brown ones in a long level gaze.
“This gonna come back and bite me in the ass, Dwight?”
“I hope not, Bo, but it’s something we’ve got to do. If she’s innocent—”
“My fault if that’s how it turns out. I put Jones on it. I knew he was a screwup, but I couldn’t spare anybody else right then. Thought it was so open and shut even he couldn’t mess it up. ’Specially with the SBI looking over his shoulder. ’Course now, maybe they used a screwup on that case, too.” He got up and poured himself another mug of black coffee, even though the ulcer that had started with his wife’s losing fight with cancer already wrenched his belly. “Talk to them and keep me posted.”
Out on the interstate, Deputy Silas Lee Jones pulled the earflaps of his wool cap down over his ears and watched sourly as Percy Denning, Mike Castleman, and Eddie Lloyd made like those forensic specialists on television. Cold enough to freeze the brass balls off a frigging monkey and they were pulling tape and punching numbers into a calculator and talking about trajectories when they didn’t have a clue in hell where that slug had gone after it passed through Tracy Johnson’s neck and shattered the window.
Yeah, they were starting from the new glass fragments they’d found by the edge of the outer northbound lane, fragments that came from the window of her car. Big damn deal.
But Major Bryant had ordered another sweep with the metal detectors, and another sweep he was going to get even if they all came down with flu for frigging Christmas. He stomped out his cigarette, pulled his gloves back on, and switched on the metal detector. Taking his own sweet time, he began to move it back and forth over the dry and brittle grass along the highway. The damn thing pinged every thirty seconds for stray bolts and screws, bits of chrome, bottle caps, a busted cell phone, even small rocks with traces of iron ore; and every ping meant he had to bend over and poke through the grass till he found the cause.
His ample paunch did not make for easy bending.
“Hey, Jones,” Denning called from the west side of the northbound lanes. “We’re gonna grid off a section up yonder.”
“Up yonder” was on the southbound side of the four lanes, but several feet forward from where they had found the glass. They waited for traffic to clear, then darted across to a spot where they began to unwind yellow tape to grid off the area.
As the morning wore on, though, the only positive thing was the upward turn of the thermometer.
Back when Martha Hurst lived in Sandy Grove Mobile Estates, the trailer park was mostly white. These days it was thoroughly mixed—white, black, Latino, and even a few Asians for good measure, which meant that no one gave Kayra Stewart and Nolan Capps the racist attitude they might have received a few years earlier.
It was an older park, with towering pine trees and mature oaks that had dropped a thick layer of leaves and straw. Some of the dilapidated trailers had weathered to a dreary gray and several almost disappeared into the overgrown azalea bushes and head-high privet. The evergreen bushes gave the closely spaced dwellings an unexpected sense of privacy. Most of the small yards were unraked patches of wiregrass trampled bare by the eight or ten preschool children who seemed to romp unwatched by any adults. They darted in and out of the bushes like small winter finches and their knit hats and gloves were the only bright bits of color here, those and parts of broken plastic toys abandoned amid the leaves: a blue plastic trike with no wheels, a red sand pail, a turquoise-and-yellow Barbie dollhouse stained by rainwater that had dripped from the oaks.
Lot #81 was now occupied by a newish model. Strings of clear white lights turned the sheltering bushes into makeshift Christmas trees. A plastic snowman sat beside the steps and a wreath of artificial holly hung on the door. The shy young woman who answered their knock looked so pregnant that Nolan almost expected to see a donkey tied up by the deck, waiting to take her to a stable in Bethlehem.
Kayra launched into their spiel, but slowed as she realized the woman was shaking her head. “You don’t speak English?”
“Don’t look at me,” said Nolan. “I took French.”
No one was home at 83 or 85, but at 82 they got lucky. “Naw, I’ve only been here four years,” said the black man who opened the door. “Who you wanna try is Miz Apple, lives down there on the bend. She’s been here forever.”
“Well, not forever, but surely the longest,” said the elderly white woman when they repeated 82’s recommendation. “But y’all come on in. It’s too cold to stand here with the door open.”
Inside was so warm that the kids immediately unwrapped their scarves, loosened their jackets, and stuffed their gloves in their pockets. The trailer was a single-wide and the tiny living room was crowded with a loveseat covered in colorful crocheted afghans, a red plush recliner, and a fifteen-inch portable television. A small artificial tree blinked cheerfully from atop the television and dozens of Christmas cards were clipped to tinsel garlands that hung across the window tops like multicolored valences.
Mrs. Apple gestured for them to take the loveseat, and as she sat down in the recliner, she adjusted the window curtain beside her chair so that she could keep an eye on the road, then picked up a crochet hook and resumed work on a pale pink crib blanket that was as soft and fluffy as her white hair. “For a neighbor’s granddaughter,” she murmured and looked at them expectantly.
“We were hoping you could tell us about Martha Hurst,” said Kayra.
“I was wondering what ya’ll were wanting when I seen you going door to door like that. Martha Hurst! Now there’s a name out of the past, idn it? Poor Martha. Did they kill her yet?”
“She’s due to die next month. Did you know her?”
“Oh child, I know everybody,” she said with a complacent glance at the many greeting cards that mutely
