courthouse with them and logged it in with the property clerk.
After that, while McLamb took the personal items over to the lab, Jamison went out to speak to Tracy Johnson’s cleaning woman, a middle-aged white woman who’d been laid off from her clerical job when her company outsourced its routine data processing to New Delhi.
“Cleaning houses is harder, but it beats working at one of them big discount stores,” she told Jamison. “I’m my own boss. Set my own hours. This way, I can at least help feed my kids and buy medical insurance. It’s a high deductible but if anything really bad happens to me or my husband, we’re covered. Besides, lessen you’re management, them places won’t give you any benefits either.”
She told Jamison that Tracy was easy to work for. “I came in four hours a week. Dusted. Vacuumed. Mopped the floors. Changed the bed, cleaned the bathroom, did the laundry. Just her and the baby and she kept the place tidy. Some people, you wouldn’t believe what pigs.”
Her main complaint seemed to be that Tracy was too by-the-letter. “She could be a little tight-assed, if you’ll pardon my French. Everybody else pays me off the books, in cash. She paid by check and she took out every penny of taxes and Social Security, too. Cost us both, but she said she was an officer of the court and she couldn’t look the other way on it. Even preached me a little sermon about the obligations of citizenship and how taxes are like greens fees, only we get to play democracy instead of a round of golf. Like I’ve ever been on a golf course. Or had much democracy either for that matter.”
She gave a sad smile. “And then she turned around and gave me a nice check for my birthday. For more than she’d withheld.”
“What about men?” Jamison asked.
The woman shrugged. “Yeah, but don’t ask me who. I never saw him. Just signs that somebody did stay over once in a while. He was always gone when I got there. Her, too, for that matter. Sometimes she’d get home before I left, but most times, I’d go a month or more without laying eyes on her or the baby either.”
“What do you mean by signs?”
“Extra towels in the laundry. Whiskers in the sink where he’d shaved and then didn’t wipe out the bowl. Beer cans in the garbage, and she drank wine. Condom wrappers in the bathroom wastebasket. Extra glasses in the dishwasher. Two coffee mugs left in the sink. The sheets. If you look, you can tell.”
“Would you say he was here this week?”
She considered. “Maybe not Friday morning. It was just the one cup and the bathroom sink was clean. And there weren’t as many extra towels as there have been, but I did see a couple of beer cans and a condom wrapper, so yeah, I’d say he stayed overnight at least once.”
“Thanks,” said Jamison, closing his notebook as he stood to go. “You’ve been very helpful.”
“Can’t help myself from noticing things.” Her face brightened. “Hey, maybe I ought to put in an application at the sheriff’s department. I could be a detective, too. How good are the benefits?”
Jamison laughed. “Benefits are fine if you don’t mind the shift changes.”
He glanced at his watch as he left. He hadn’t eaten lunch yet and his interview with the prisoner who’d sent Tracy a death threat wasn’t for another hour. Plenty of time to swing by the house and grab a sandwich and maybe play with Jack Junior for a few minutes.
The receptionist at the pediatrician’s office in Raleigh was properly solemn about the death of their small patient and the patient’s mother, but she wanted to make it clear to Deputy Richards that Dr. Trogden was conferring an enormous favor by shortening his lunch hour in order to talk to her. “I hope you won’t keep him longer than is strictly necessary.”
“I’ll try,” Richards promised.
“Terrible thing,” said the young doctor as he came around the desk to shake her hand. “Just terrible. But I don’t see how I can help you. Mei was a normally healthy little girl. I saw her for her one-year checkup and everything was fine then. I was to have seen her for an ear infection late Friday afternoon, but as you know . . .”
“Yes,” said Richards. “We were wondering if Ms. Johnson gave any indication when she called that she was worried about anything else.”
“No, but ask my nurse. She took that call and then called back later after she checked my schedule and saw that we could squeeze Mei in.”
“Sorry,” said the nurse, reading from her notes in little Mei’s file folder. “It really was a routine call. Ms. Johnson was upset that Mei was in pain, but that’s normal for conscientious mothers. They’d rather hurt themselves than see their kids hurting. She said she had to be in court until around four, so I suggested a mild pain reliever and told her to bring the child in as soon before five as she could. There was absolutely nothing out of the ordinary about that call.”
Struck by a sudden thought, Richards said, “Could you tell me who recommended Dr. Trogden to Ms. Johnson?”
The forms had two holes punched in the top margin and were held to the file by metal prongs that folded over each other. The nurse flipped to the bottom form that Tracy Johnson had filled out on Mei’s first office visit. “Here it is. Dr. Grace MacAdams recommended us.”
“MacAdams? She’s ob-gyn, isn’t she?”
“That’s right. Her office is two blocks further down Blue Ridge Road.”
“Sure,” Terry Wilson had said when Dwight called him around noon. “Come on over now and I’ll order another barbecue plate. You want potatoes or hushpuppies?”
“Neither. Just double slaw or string beans,” Dwight told him.
“Deborah got you on a diet already?”
Dwight laughed and said he’d be there in twenty minutes. When he walked into the SBI facility on Old Garner Road, Terry met him at the entrance and whisked him past security down to his office, where two foam clamshells were giving off the appetizing smell of hickory-smoked barbecue and fried cornbread.
“I told you no hushpuppies,” Dwight said.
“Think I don’t remember the last time you said that? You wound up eating half of mine.”
